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THE LIBRARY 
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OF CALIFORNIA 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2008 with funding from 
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http://www.archive.org/details/dantecatholicohi00ozan 


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IN THE 
THIRTEENTH CENTURY 


BY 


FREDERIC OZANAM 





TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LUCIA D. PYCHOWSKA 


SECOND EDITION 


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New YORK 
THE CATHEDRAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 


1913 





COPYRIGHT 1806, 


PREFACE. 


mR EstRouS of enlightening those who lived in the 
shade or in the gloom, Dante chanted the 

ee grandest of poems in a vulgar tongue. 
Even the lyre of his Master, Virgil, seemed too 
small for him who aspired, through a perfect art, 
to be a perpetual and universal teacher of Chris- 
tiantruth. Putting aside Latin, and choosing Ital- 
ian as the medium of his verse, the poet did wise- 
ly ; and yet the use of a living language has not 
made him a poet of the people. We have all read 
the pretty tales, recounting how the simplest of Ital- 
ian folk were wont to please themselves as they la- 
bored, and, at the same time, to astonish ingenuous 
barbarians, by singing intelligently whole cantos of 
the Divine Comedy ; but vainly shall we seek the 
names of these intellectual proletarians. Boccaccio 
would not risk an interpretation of Dante’s master- 
piece, before invoking, with the greatest humility, 
the assistance of the God of Light. Five centuries 
have passed since Boccaccio’s famous and imperfect 
essay. Age after age, religiously, patiently, schoi- 
ars have toiled over the pages of the Divine Com- 

i 


ib, Preface. 


edy. Still, in our day, a writer of uncommon learn- 
ing and intellect, Cesare Cantt, has said that ‘* even 
an Italian reader of Dante's trilogy is obliged to 
study it as if it were a foreign book, consulting, 
alternately, the text and a commentary.” What- 
ever his fate, had the poet of the universe sang al- 
ways to the music of the little lyre he first tempted, 
he has been, and is, and will ever be the poet of 
educated people only ; and, even among these, he 
can be understood, inasmuch as he is intelligible, 
by the studious alone. 

Though a reckless or an incompetent translator 
may relieve us of many of the difficulties that an 
Italian cannot escape, no translator, however skil- 
ful, can turn Dante’s text into light reading. As 
Frederick von Schlegel wrote, when M. Ozanam 
was in his cradle: ‘A preparatory initiation into a 
vast extent of varied knowledge is necessary, in 
order to understand the poem either as a whole or 
in detail.” Dante’s geography and astronomy are 
not those of our school books. Theallegory of the 
poem is far from being transparent. One may be 
well read, and yet find the poet’s local history and 
allusions puzzling. And how many fairly educatea 
persons can follow the poet closely, as he developes 
and resolves the most practical cases in ethics, and 


Preface. lil. 


the most abstruse questions in theology and phil- 
osophy ! 

Within a twelvemonth, I read a review of no less 
than fifty-three Italian works, recently published, 
intended to explicate, or to illustrate, Dante’s text; 
and the Venetian and Tuscan critics require at least 
two periodicals to hold and preserve their lucubra- 
tions. Foreigners may consider themselves fortunate 
in escaping a school of criticism so voluminous and 
so distracting, whose chief apology is the poet’s fre- 
quent and vain-glorious abuse of that same vulgar 
tongue which he adopted for the sake of the plain 
people; and yet the foreigner is helpless without 
the critic and the commentator. 

Within the last fifty years, in Italy as well as 
outside of Italy, the world of learning has shown 
the most helpful and healthful appreciation of Dan- 
te’s work, great andsmall. American as well as Eng- 
lish students have composed creditable transla- 
tions of his master-poem and many volumes intended 
to explain away difficulties, to familiarize a read- 
er with the poet’s personality, to explicate his teach- 
ing or to describe the machinery of the Inferno, 
the Purgatory, and the Paradise. Helpful and 
healthful are not epithets applicable however, to all 
the volumes published in English or in the lan- 


iV. Preface. 


guages of the continent. Many have been harmful 
and even vicious. For a long time in Italy, the 
spirit of revolt has pretended to derive inspiration 
from Dante’s pages, and, to-day, the Italian Anar- 
chists, enemies of God and of mankind, shamefully 
claim him as a precursor. The Protestant tradi- 
tion that the most illustrious of Catholic poets was 
a foe to the Papacy is still alive, and though 
many non-Catholics are led to study the trilogy 
because of Dante’s glorious imagination; strange 
philosophical and theological science; forcible, 
compact, unique style; passionate expression of 
sentiment and of creed; there are few who ate not 
prejudiced in his favor, especially, and one might 
say invincibly, because, more or less justly, he at- 
tacked ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church, 
and, more or less considerately, censured evils that 
afflicted the Church, in his day. Only a Cath- 
olic can duly estimate the value of Dante’s cen 
sures, which, however violent, impugn in no wise 
the doctrine or the divine organization of the 
Church; as only a Catholic can, with full intelli- 
gence and perfect sympathy, comprehend the phil- 
osophical views and theological tenets of the medi- 
tative religious poet, who ‘‘ towers above all others 
in solitary grandeur.” 


/ veface. Ve 


Of Catholic English guides through the intrica- 
cies of the Dantean labyrinth, there has been a 
dearth, all the more surprising when we recall the 
many good books written in Italian, French and 
German. Not more than a couple, among the sev- 
eral volumes deserving a careful translation, have 
been offered to a public that should have, and that 
daily shows an increasing desire to have, a more 
familiar acquaintance with the grandest of Catholic 
poets, and the most sublime of all poets. We can- 
not doubt, therefore, of the success of this agree- 
able translation of Frédéric Ozanam’s: Dante, and 
Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century, a work 
received with general applause at the time of its 
publication, and one whose utility has not been di- 
minished by the lapse of years. 

More than once M. Ozanam has told how his in- 
terest in the poet was first awakened. During a 
visit to Rome, in the year 1833, when he was just 
twenty years of age, the sensitive and thoughtful 
Frenchman found himself, one day, standing in the 
Camera della Segnatura before Raphael’s Dispuza. 
Lowering his eyes from the heaven in which angels 
and saints are grouped beneath the Blessed Trinity, 
he began to examine the faces of the doctors and 
pontiffs of the Church, who are distributed on 


Vi. Preface. 


either side of the altar of the Most Blessed Sacra- 
ment. One head, garlanded with laurel, attracted 
him. Who was the noble and austere stranger that 
Raphael deemed worthy of a place beside St. Am- 
brose, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. 
Bonaventure, and Innocent III.? Dante! Why 
should the painter thus honor a poet? This 
question M, Ozanam answered satisfactorily, only 
after years of most patient and enthusiastic study. 

His first essay on the subject was written in 1838, 
when he competed for the degree of Doctor of 
Letters. Seven years later the first edition of the 
present work appeared; and shortly afterwards, it 
found one German and no less than four Italian 
translators. In 1843 M. Ozanam began a series of 
studies, which were printed in Ze Correspondant, on 
“The Franciscan poets in Italy during the Thir- 
teenth century”’;a series that he completed and 
published only a short time before his death in 
1853. Not the least valuable chapter in this ad- 
mirable volume, which still awaits a translator, is 
the one dealing with “ The Poetical Sources of the 
Divine Comedy.” ‘To fit himself to solve the prob- 
lem that Raphael made for him, M. Ozanam under- 
took a French translation of the Divine Comedy, 
with an extended commentary on the poem. Seven 


Preface. Vii. 


years he devoted to this work; and of the sev- 
en, four were expended on the Purgatory alone. 
Could we ask for a more telling proof that Dante 
can be “ popularized” only among the educated 
and the studious! 

Nominated, in the autumn of 1844, a Professor 
-in the Sorbonne, for life, M. Ozanam determined to 
turn his studies on Dante to profitable use. He 
had always intended that they should serve to illus- 
trate the comprehensive history of Christian civili- 
zation which he had planned in his youth; and it 
was in accordance with this design that he made 
the Divine Comedy the subject of his lectures, at 
the Sorbonne, between the years 1847 and 1850. Of 
his translation and commentary, we have only 
“The Purgatory of Dante,” published after M. 
Ozanam’s death; a work that has passed through 
several editions, and that has benefited many 
students of the incomparable Catholic poet. 

Readers of “ Dante, and Catholic Philosophy in 
the Thirteenth Century’? can feel assured of the 
competence and honesty of their guide. His chief 
aim was, once for all, to expose the guile of those 
whosought to associate Dante,—who so passionately 
loved truth and the disciples of truth and who glo- 
ried in anathematizing public errors and the adepts 


Vill. Preface. 


of error,—with “ the tumultuous rabble of the hetero- 
dox”; and then, doing the poet justice, to prove his 
right to stand, where Raphael placed him, ‘* among 
the most noble disciples of eternal orthodoxy.” 
With textual difficulties, with criticism purely 
literary, M. Ozanam did not occupy himself. He 
confined himself to the study of Dante as a states- 
man and philosopher; to his political experiences 
and philosophical education; to a sketch of the 
philosophical movement, prior to the thirteenth 
century; to a review of the poet’s philosophical 
opinions and of the teaching of his preceptors. 
The author of ‘Dante, and the Philosophy of the 
Thirteenth Century” did not exhaust the subject. 
He made no such pretension. His purpose was 
merely to culture a small part of a most fruitful 
field that had long been allowed to lie fallow. 
Commendation of a work which has stood the 
test of half a century of criticism, would be pre- 
sumptuous. M. Ozanam knew how to interest as 
well as to instruct. A reader of this volume will 
find that he has formed an acquaintance not alone 
with Dante, the philosopher, but also with Dante 
the man; and that the author has brought the 
thirteenth century very near to us, permitting us to 
appreciate more intelligently its characteristics, 


Preface. se 


and profitably to compare medieval civilization 
with that which we call modern. Perhaps, treating 
of the poet’s political opinions, M. Ozanam attrib- 
uted to them, here and there, a signification that 
the poet himself would have disowned. Still the 
author’s ingenious views may suggest to some in- 
dustrious Catholic a closer study of a tempestuous 
period of French history; a period covering the 
years between 1830 and 1853. If M. Ozanam’s 
political views had a peculiar tint, it was merely a 
reflection of the color of his time. 

The mere mention of the name of Antoine Fréd- 
éric Ozanam tempts one to write at length of the 
virtuous and talented and brave, and, above all, 
charitable champion of the Catholic faith, rather 
than of the scholar, writer and orator. Still it is 
fitting here to recall his gift of eloquence; a gift 
that, long before his appointment to the Sorbonne, 
had gained him fame and position. How elo- 
quent he could be, with the written as well as with 
the spoken word, many passages in this book man- 
ifest.. The mastery of the Italian singer, the 
majesty of his conception, the virile power of his 
language, the vivacity of his imagination, could not 
fail to arouse the sensitive soul of Ozanam, es- 
pecially when he was engaged in searching the 


Se Preface. 


soul of one who loved, with a love so tender, so ar- 
dent, so loyal “ the daughter of God, the Queen of 
things, noble and beautiful above all others, Phil- 
osophy.”’ 

The translation of ‘‘ Dante, and the Philosophy of 
the Thirteenth Century,” now presented to an en- 
lightened public, needs no compliment other than 
that paid it by an American writer, widely es- 
teemed, and affectionately cherished by all who knew 
him personally,—Brother Azarias. He stood spon- 
sor for the work, as ] am informed by the distin- 
guished Director of the Cathedral Library, pro- 
nouncing it excellent. Thanks to him also, it found 
a long-sought publisher, in the person of one who 
has done much to keep alive the memory of the 
modest Christian Brother, whose rare talents were 
ever devoted to the cause of Catholic truth. His 
scholarly essay on the Spiritual Sense of the Divina 
Commedia, evinced extensive research and fruitful 
study, and adds weight to his approval of this vol- 
ume. 

Hearing that the translator is one of the gentler— 
and shall I not say : the more poetical—sex, Cath- 
olic men may express surprise ; and indeed a few 
may feel remorse. Let us hope that, influenced by 
the example of one painstaking and intellectual 


Preface. XL. 


woman, others may be led to attempt work no less 
serious and serviceable, leaving the ‘short story ” 
to the more volatile and vain male sex. To me, it 
seems eminently right and proper that a woman 
sould have made it possible for English readers to 
acquire a correct notion of the philosophy of Dante, 
as well as of the scope and aim of the Divine Com- 
edy. Was there everaman who honored women 
with an affection like unto that the poet avowed 
for those “ three blessed ladies,” Beatrice, St. Lucy 
and the Virgin Mother of God! 

Great works demand and deserve meditation ; 
and, in a sense, all good books are great. Dante's 
epic compels meditation ; M. Ozanam’s good book 
deserves meditation. Notalonesilver shalladelver 
find m it, but also the more precious gold. The 
poet gave an example to all who would have sound 
knowledge about deep things. At first it was diffi- 
cult for him to enter into the thoughts of the phil- 
osophers; but he persisted, and finally, through 
patience, he penetratedthem. Notto his patience, 
or to the natural powers of his mind, did he award 
all the credit for his successful mastery of things 
subtle and profound. After pondering long over 
books, having sought Philosophy where alone she 
loves to dwell, “in the schools of the religious and 


XI. Preface. 


in the assemblies of philosophers,” Dante felt bound, 
giving the world the result of his experience, to 
inculcate a lesson; an old lesson, though one not 
easily learned. ‘‘ Alay God permit thee, reader, to 


’ 


gather fruit from thy reading,’ said the poet, in “the 
twentieth strain of the first song, whose awful theme 
records the spirits whelmed in woe.” These sig- 
nificant words may well serve as an introduction to 
Frédéric Ozanam’s: Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


in the Thirteenth Century. 
Joun A. Mooney. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 





PAGE 
PRELIMINARY Discourse.—Tradition of Letters in Italy, 


ww 


from the Latin Decadence to Dante........ .......... 
InrRopuction.— Authority of Dante in regard to Philoso- 


phy.—Design of the Proposed Work............++++- 47 


PART I. 


CHAPTER I.—Religious, Political, and Intellectual Situation 
of Christendom from the Thirteenth to the Fourteenth 
Century; Causes Favoring the Development of Phil- 


OSOPM ss etecia ssi teinie ectole eof « ssnisjoleielarmie =ielepsieicie olntels iain -» 63 
Cuapter II.—Scholastic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Cen- 


CHAPTER III.—Special Characteristics of Italian Philosophy. 96 
Cuapter LV.—Life, Studies, and Genius of Dante. General 
Design of the Divine Comedy. Place Occupied in it by 


Thewe Ml OSOphicalwE Omen tra estenclscervertele sense tedseteteyel 104 


PART IT. 


Exposition of Dante's Philoschhical Doctrines. 


CHaprnn lk— Prolegomenare .scmiterrieteisre/lelsts)s «le\e) oie = 5600 UBB 
CHAPTER IT.—Evil....... + or 8 iii slain RUS hehe Une e aeemen e 145 


XIV. Table of Contents. 


PAGE 

CHAPTER III.—Evil and Good, in Conjunction and in Con- 
LCC SE REM a Ae 6 asc epi s Oe OO Dols 175 
CHAPTER PVi—Go0d 9). .% walsvateleteus Males eee a sete ee 222 


PART IIL. 


CHAPTER I.—Dante’s Philosophy Considered.—Analogies 
with Oriental Doctrines... 2+. 0.2... ..2. se. -eae cess ee 270 
CHAPTER JI.—Relations of Dante’s Philosophy to the 
Schools of Antiquity. Plato and Aristotle—Idealism 
MOL SEURTI eco ganeooeac she toners lovol ar aheton tistedcnotaretategetcle 280 
CHAPTER III.—Relations of Dante’s Philosophy with the 
Schools of the Middle Ages.—St. Bonaventura and St. 
Thomas Aquinas. Mysticism and Dogmatism........ 302 
CHAPTER IV.—Analogy between the Philosophy of Dante 
and Modern Philosophy.—Empiricism and Rationalism. 327 
CHAPTER V.—The Orthodoxy of Dante....... erste roueleuateiepete 343 


PART IV. 


Inquiries and Documents in Aid of the History of 
Dante and of Contemporary Philosophy. 


I. Dante's Pouiticat LirE.—Was heaGuelfor a Ghibelline? 361 

II. BEATRIcE.—Influence of Women in Christian Society, 
and of Catholic Symbolism in the Arts——The Three 
Blessed Women, Beatrice, St. Lucy, and the Blessed 


Virgins Mary: ss. ets teem eres ROOT SOOO Sooo'cc 383 


Table of Contents. 


XV. 


PAGE 


TI. Dante’s First Strupies iv PutLosopny.—Extracts from 
the Convito.—Conjectures in Regard to the Period of 
Dante’s Journey to Paris.—Researches of M. Victor le 
Clere Concerning Siger de Brabant.—Conclusions, in 


Aid of the Interpretation of the Poem... ........... 


DOCUMENTS 


In Elucidation of the History of Philosophy in the 
Thirteenth Century. 


I. Bull of Innocent IV. For the Revival of Philosophical 
SUING Sarnia are hates eval oxcitea oral sr ots, eyohe shel sree niet sre iauele chops) = 
II. General Classification of Human Knowledge. Treatise 
by St. Bonaventura. ....... 2.2 cece ces eee cence ences 
III. Gop: an Extract from St. Bonaventura.............. 
TV. Man: Extracts from St. Bonaventura ............... 
V. Society: PHILOSOPHY OF THE LAw; Po.itics: Extracts 
riRoveal fopey Aaa oR NGM oe Gobsanoonsomeuosuno dc 
VI. Nature: Extracts from Albert the Great, and from 


Roger Bacon. .. 2... 05.2505 seeoes Pee eta scl 


AppenDix, No L, IL, and IJII............ vee »-003, 504, 


443 


445 


455 


460 


471 


DANTE, AND CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE 
THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 


PRELIMINARY DISCOURSE. 


Tradition of Letters in Italy, from the Latin Decadence to Dante. 


MID the doubts and passions disquieting our age, the past in- 
terests us mainly by its relations to ourselves, thatis, by 
what we still retain of it. The chief interest of the his- 

tory of literature consists in seeking out among the intellectual 
monuments of all the ages, the ways of Providence and the general 
laws governing the human mind. Literatures follow one another: 
we are concerned in knowing whether they are bound together and 
continue one another; whether, by the side of the poetic instincts 
which everywhere awake spontaneously, there is a learned dis- 
cipline, which constitutes art, and which the nations transmit one 
to another, always taught and always teaching, accomplishing but 
one and the same work as they follow one and the same destiny. 
To. state the question in briefer terms, what we wish to know is. 


if there exists a tradition of letters. 
3 


4 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Modern researches have begun to re-link in history the suc- 
cession of epochs. On one side, the languages, legends, and doc- 
trines of classic antiquity, which were thought to have originated 
in the regions where they chiefly flourished, have been connected 
with the civilizations of the Orient. The old pretensions to au- 
tochthonous development have disappeared before the proofs ofa 
common and distant derivation. On the other side, in the little 
known depths of the Middle Ages, in the systems of its schools, 
and in the works of its great masters, we have been obliged to 
recognize the legitimate sources of modern science and art. The 
world at large has ceased to date from Luther the awakening of 
human reason. Thus has been established on the one hand the 
unity of the centuries of antiquity, and on the other, that of the 
Christian ages. It now remains to study more closely the inter- 
val separating these two eras in the world’s history. We must 
examine whether letters perished during the terrible years occu- 
pied by the fall of the Roman Empire and the incursions of the 
barbarians. Were they then extinguished to be subsequently re- 
vived by a concurrence of favorable circumstances, or did they un- 
dergoa transformation which was to save them, and thus preserve 
continuity of instruction? 

The Renaissance, for a long time placed at the period of the 
taking of Constantinople, has by some been thrown back to the 


date of the Crusades, and by others to the reign of Charlemagne. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 5 


Even before Charlemagne, we find the Roman muses sheltered in 
Trish and Anglo-Saxon monasteries. But we must come to closer 
quarters with these researches. They should be pursued on their 
proper ground, in Italy, the last refuge of antiquity and the start- 
ing point of the Middle Ages. There it is that we may obtain a 
view of the most memorable transition which has ever taken 
place. Through what phases did letters pass during eleven hundred 
years, from che Latin decadence to the first writings in the vul- 
gar tongue? How did the human mind lay aside its pagan habits 
to take on a new character? This is the revolution we shall en- 
deavor to follow, seeking in its long course to discover, if we can, 
the unity of the tradition of letters. First, we will consider that 
tradition as existing among the Romans, such as antiquity had 
made it in the age of Augustus; then we will watch it as re- 
generated by Christianity; we will examine whether it traversed 
the period of barbarism, and how it was reproduced in the works 
of Italian genius, whence in turn it went forth to reign over 
every literature in Hurope. 
ie 

If we consider Roman civilization at the opening of the mod- 
ern era, we shall find that it had its roots in the whole of antiquity. 
Wesee in it the result and abridgment of the anterior civilizations, 
and, as it were, the latest effort of the human mind after the Japse 


of four thousand years. The Latin language itself, by the incon 


6 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


testable originality of its character, by its radical analogies with 
the Greek and the Sanscrit, bears witness to the primitive rela- 
tions existing between the Orient, Greece, and Italy. Rome appears 
to have received from the East, through the Etruscans, its gravest 
religious institutions, the remains of a disfigured truth not lacking 
grandeur. I mean that science of auguries and worship of the 
manes Which made of life a ceaseless communion with the gods and 
with ancestral spirits. The arts and the sense of beauty came to 
Rome from Greece. through the neighborhood of the Dorian cities 
of Calabria and Sicily. Later, after the Macedonian war, Greek 
pedagognues were to be bought in the slave market; patrician 
youths studied in the schools of Athens or of Rhodes; the Latin 
muses grew rich by imitation, another species of conquest. But 
the characteristic quality of the Roman genius, that which it owed 
only to itself and to the old Latium where it had its birth, was 
the practical sense of justice, the instinct of rights, of law. Laws 
were reduced to a science—jurisprudence. Eloquence deferded 
law at home, while arms imposed it abroad; the entire existence 
of the ancient Romans was enclosed in this circle. It was by 
reason of the energetic precision of their mental constitution 
that they surpassed all who had preceded them. The Greeks 
wrought for glory, the Romans for empire. They desired not so 
much the admiration as the obedience of men. They used letters 


as a power. The remembrance of public affairs (ves publica) is 


In the Thirteenth Century. "4 


impressed on their finest works, as the name of the senate and 
the people on their monuments. By the majesty of Cicero’s har- 
angues, we recognize a speech which is mistress in the affairs of 
the world; the poetry of Virgil is never detached from the politi- 
cal cause which it has embraced: art has something to do beside 
charming; it must be of use. There was then at Rome in liter- 
ature as in society, a secular tradition, of which Italy was the or- 
gan, in the middle portion through Latium, in the South by the 
Hellenic colonies of Magna Greecia, and in the North by the Asi- 
atic colonies of Etruria; so that all the labors of the past had 
there found their goal, and all the civilized peoples of the earth 
seemed to have put their hands to the work of forming their 
masters. 5 

Now, the three chief things constituting Roman civilization, 
namely, religion, laws, and letters, were bordering on their deca- 
dence. We must follow them in their downward course, to learn 
if their destinies divide or run side by side, to know what was to 
be done away with and what retained. 

The downfall of paganism was not at all what we have been 
accustomed to think it. The ancient religion did not disappear 
rapidly to make way for the Gospel. Notwithstanding the scoffs 
of philosophers, the multitude were slow in deserting its altars; 
the advent of the emperors gave to it a species of restoration; 


minds were led back to it by the lassitude of doubt or the uneasi- 


8 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ness of remorse. Its strength was renewed by the introduction 
of the foreign worships of Serapis and Mithras. But these 
borrowed religions only brought to it a more learned error; 
they abolished neither impure observances nor bloody rites. 
Paganism did not then reform itself as if to meet the truth half 
way; it disputed the ground to the very end. The last traces 
were long preserved, and that which thus remained was an ob- 
stacle and not a help for the future. ‘ 

Not thus, however, did legislation fare. At first it seemed as 
if the entire Roman edifice were about tocrumble. The emperor, 
who, under this military title was merely the head of the plebeians, 
completed the destruction of the patrician city, long shaken in its 
sacerdotal and military constitution. The city perished, and with 
it disappeared, little by little, its pitiless laws and the jealous solem- 
nities with which it surrounded civil acts. But, meantime, the 
empire was in course of establishment. The provinces developed 
under a common administration ; their usages, collected and codi- 
fied by the jurisconsults, formed a public or national law, which 
was put forward to oppose the rigor of the old civil law, and 
which gave new foundations to the family, to property, and to 
justice. It was this public law, that is to say, the law which the 
world had made for itself through the medium of Rome, which 
was preserved in the compilations of Justinian to become the basis 


of future societies. All Europe is founded on this inheritance. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 9 


fhe destiny of letters is similar to that of laws. At first, they 
are seen to decline rapidly. A time came when, the processes of 
art absorbing the mind, the care for the form carried away the 
thought, and began to lower its flight. That moment was deci- 
sive. An arrogant reaction set in against the great writers of the 
preceding age. The illusion of false theories, the glitter of de- 
clamatory exercises and of public lectures, completed the aberra- 
tions of eloquence and of poetry. Inspiration, which gives life, 
retreated; and with it, style, which is the light by which we see 
the thought. And yet, this is the very period when Latin liter- 
ature laid hold on the future. Rome then achieved two memor- 
able acts for the diffusion and the preservation of human learning. 

First, as she saw that she had received from the Eastern na- 
tions all she could expect from them, Rome turned toward the 
West. She there found rude manners and undisciplined minds ; 
she undertook to lift these to her own level. During the long 
period when her conquests seemed to have come to an end, she 
subjugated the earth a second time, and even more completely, 
by her language and her institutions. The propagating move- 
ment may be followed. We see letters start from the North of 
Italy, and spread by way of Roman Gaul into Spain, where they 
raised up the brilliant generation of the two Senecas, Lucan, 
Quintilian, and Martial. They afterwards passed into Africa, in 


the time of Cornutus, Fronto, and Apuleius, to return to Gaul, 


10 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


and even to Treves on the confines of Germany, with the pane- 
gyrists, with Ausonius, Rutilius, and Sidonius Apollinaris. Thus 
did foreigners obtain citizenship in the republic of letters as well 
as in the state. Rome was not ignorant of the danger of this in- 
vasion; she was aware of what she must lose in elegance and 
nobility, in thus consorting with the sons of barbarians. Her 
glory consists in not having been repelled by the sight of them. 
She naturalized them, civilized them; she pursued at her own 
risk and peril the education of the writers aud the nationalities. 
This was not simply the course of events; it was a benefit un- 
derstood and intended. Pliny pronounced upon Italy this re- 
markable eulogium, that ‘‘The gods seem to have chosen her to 
give to the world a serener sky, to unite all empires, to bring to- 
gether discordant tongues, and to restore to man, humanity.” 
And Tertullian, going a step farther, coined a new word, an elo- 
quent barbarism, to express that universal culture which was ° 
spread abroad from the British Islands to the extremities of Hun- 
gary; he called it, Romanitas. 

At the same time, and that the widening circle might have a 
centre, a new power, unknown to preceding ages, was in progress 
of establishment: public instruction. Egypt had its initiations, 
surrounded by mystery; at Athens, the care of literary instruc- 
tion was left to the good will or the ecupidity of the learned. In 


Italy, the land of discipline, teaching was to become a magistracy. 


In the Thirteenth Century. II 


Cesar sanctioned it by surrounding it with immunities and 
privileges; Vespasian assigned a public salary for the mainte- 
nance of masters of belles-lettres. Then arose those celebrated 
schools of the Capitol, to which order and prosperity were insured 
by imperial legislation, and which, under the reign of Valentinian 
III., counted thirty professors, surrounded by innumerable pupils. 
Two instructors taught philosophy and jurisprudence: there 
were three Latin rhetoricians, five Greek sophists, ten Greek and 
ten Latin erammarians. Twenty-nine libraries held the learned 
treasures of antiquity. Similar foundations were multiplied 
throughout Italy, and a constitution of Antoninus Pius extended 
them to the cities of the provinces. At the sight of these potent 
means, one is at first surprised at the mediocrity of the results. 
One naturally looks with disdain upon schools which follow ages 
of greatness, and whence issue only obscure generations. In vain 


’ 


did Quintilian, in his ‘ Institutes of the Orator,” undertake the 
education of the eloquent man. He was not permitted actually 
to see the ideal orator whom he so solicitously endeavored to 
form. However, let us beware of too rash a judgment: those 
erammarians, artificers in words, who passed their days in con- 
troversies regarding syntax, were watching over the preservation 
of one of the most beautiful languages in the world. Those 


scholiasts, whose persistent commentaries seem to fasten like 


canker-worms on the writings of poets and prose-authors, will 


12 _ Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


yet, in the discussion of every syllable, maintain the correctness 
of the texts, throw light upon obscure passages, and preserve the 
remembrance of usages that have passed away. To them do we 
owe the boon of being able to read intelligently the works of the 
great men, their masters and ours. Macrobius, Servius, Teren- 
tianus Maurus, Martianus Capella, by gathering together the 
learning of their time, became the teachers of the Middle Ages. 
Wait a few hundred years, and from those very schools which 
seem to you so useless, will come forth disciples beyond their 
utmost hopes; from them are to issue the radiant figures of Dante 
and Petrarch. In this, as in so many other cases, it is found that 
man has been working for a future other than the near one in his 
thoughts. He does otherwise than he intends to do, often, much 
more than he dreams of; and when his work is completed, we 
cannot refrain from admiring the all-powerful will that worked 
with him. Now, this obscure labor which preserved to us classic 
letters, this teaching, which had its focus in Italy, and its rays 
everywhere, is what I mean by tradition. Tradition thus gave 
shelter to art, that the period of storms might be safely traversed, 
as the ark, on the eve of the deluge, gathered the living creatures 
within its hold. The ark was but a darksome refuge, poor and 
narrow, and yet all the nobler part of nature found shelter there. 
Similarly, the tradition of letters seems reduced to the meagre 


scaffolding of scholastic glosses and grammatical rules; and yetit 


In the Thirteenth Century. 13 


holds within its bounds all the great literary epochs of Europe. 
Where we have been accustomed to see only a decadence, we must 
recognize a starting-point. 

Tie 

But while letters were to be saved, pagan society was to end 
by a dissolution relaxing sucessively all its thews. That was 
the period when the Christian Church began its work in Rome. 
Between these two inimical societies, an abyss existed; how was 
the human mind to bridge it? How should Christianity enter in- 
to letters, and letters into Christianity? Here the question pre- 
sents itself in all its difficulty. And it is here that we must en- 
deavor to grasp the secret bonds by which the ages are knitted 
together. 

First, the Gospel penetrated into Roman civilization by a latent 
influence which has not been sufficiently considered. We must look 
closely at that interior and communicative power which was ex- 
erted upon the pagans themselves: we must go down, so to speak, 
into the moral catacombs, hollowed out beneath the soil of pagan- 
ism, in order that the final upheaval might be wrought. We may 
follow the traces of the Apostolic preaching into the palace of the 
Ceesars, and we may watch the regenerative thought slowly 
spreading by the current of opinions, even into the laws and into 
literature. Thus, at the end of the reign of Claudius, we sud- 


denly meet with two decisions, one of which modifies the right of 


14 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


life and death held by masters, and the other emancipates women 
from the perpetual tutelage exercised by their kindred. And ° 
these two acts, subversive of the whole public economy of the 
Romans, contrary to all previous efforts of jurisprudence, to the 
entire tendency of manners, are found, by a singular coincidence, 
at the very moment of the propagation of the new faith which frees 
the slave through the power of conscience, and woman by virginity. 
The hidden action of Christianity shows itself especially in liter- 
ature, as, forexample, when we come to investigate the celebrated 
question of the relations of St. Paul with Seneca. We soon recog- 
nize the profound difference existing between the stoicism of the 
Greeks, of which the basis was wholly pagan, and the views of 
the Roman stoic, who re-establishes the relations between God 
and man, through grace and love. Thus in the presence of the 
new dogma, a silent reform had been wrought in the system of 
the stoics. This better doctrine, adopted by Seneca, recognizable 
in Epictetus, was to come to the throne with Mareus Aurelius, 
and to give to the empire its last fair days. So that the Gospel, 
accused of the decadence of Rome, on the contrary, really delayed 
the course of events. While pagans were burning Christians in 
the gardens of Nero, the torches of those festivals were already 


enlightening the world. ? 





! A decree of the senate under Claudius abolishes the tutelage of the rel- 
atives over women who have reached a twelve-year-old majority. An- 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 15 


The celebrated thesis of the relations existing between Seneca 
and St. Paul has been so compromised by incompetent criticism that 
one can no longer refer to the subject without adducing the 
proofs. The strongest, that which has been the most neglected, 
and which appears to us decisive, is the distinction between the 
two stoicisms; on the one side that of Zeno, Chrysippus, and 
Cleanthes, whose metaphysics teaches the absolute unity of nature, 
the divinity of the world, the future absorption and annihilation 
of the soul in the divine essence, the sum of all things enclosed in 
a fatal circle of successive destructions and creations ; finally, the 
exaltation of the human being so far as tomake hima portion of the 
divinity ; this last is a pagan doctrine very similar to that of the 
Indian Vedanta. Ou the other hand, we find the esoteric doctrine 
of Seneca, who distinguishes between the divine and the human per- 
sonalities, God acting as a father, and preventing by His assistance 
man who corresponds by love; add to this the combat between 
the spirit and the flesh, immortality, moral freedom, and the pre- 
cept’ of universal brotherhood. These doctrines are not inferred 
from obscure illusions contained in the public writings of the 
philosopher ; they are found in his most intimate correspondence; 
they fill entire epistles ; see especially letters 41, 42, 95, 102, 120. 


Tf, besides, such doctrines cannot be attributed to the personal ele- 





other frees slaves abandoned by their masters on account of sickness or old 
age. See M. Troplong’s Memoire, analyzed in the Comptes rendus de 
Vv Academie des sciences morales et politiques. 


16 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


vation of character of a man dishonored by so many weaknesses, 
one naturally thinks of the circumstances that might have brought 
him in contact with the teaching of St. Paul. These are indicated 
in the excellent Memoire of M. Greppo; the preaching of St. Paul 
at the Areopagus, his discussions with the Athenian stoies, his 
appearance at Corinth before the pro-consul Annaeus Gallio, a 
brother of Seneca’s, and his arrival at Rome, where he was placed 
in the custody of Afranius Burrhus, prefect of the preetorium. 
Since the above was written, I have seen the question of the re- 
lations between St. Paul and Seneca treated with much power and 
ingenuity in the ‘ Césars,” by M. de Champagny. 

In the second place, if we study Christianity in itself, amid all 
the obscurity of these first two centuries we find it already in the 
full possession of its spiritual power: it bears within it all that 
it is to bring forth. The Church is but just born, and yet it has 
its hierarchy crowned by the papacy, its liturgy consecrated by 
the Eucharistic sacrifice. In the representations of sacred per- 
sons and things in the catacombs, we see the beginnings of the 
traditional types of Christian art; later, the tombs of the martyrs 
will rise to the light of day, and the basilicas that cover them will 
lift to the very heavens their triumphant cupolas. The sacred 
scriptures open a well-spring, previously unknown, wherein letters 
are to be renewed. The Acts of the Martyrs are the beginnings 


of modern history, and in the allegorical “ Visions of Hermas ” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 07 


we recognize a new-born poetry, the first example of the books 
of visions so numerous in the Middle Ages, books that will finally 
inspire the Divine Comedy. 

Thirdly, the Christian religion, notwithstanding its radical new- 
ness, did not abjure the old civilization which it had come to regen- 
erate. One must not here look to see a desperate conspiracy, a 
deliberate revolt, the facile heroism of enmity. The men who 
were given to the lions did not deny their Roman fatherland; they 
believed in its destinies, they looked upon the empire as the sole 
bond which hindered the world from falling asunder, and they 
asked of God its preservation. The arts lent them antique forms 
for the expression of their thoughts; their sepulchral paintings 
still recall the methods of pagan artists; in them, the figure of 
Orpheus, by a bold symbol, represents Christ drawing hearts to 
Himself. At the same time, the first Fathers of the Chureh rec- 
ognize the services of reason; they find in the doctrines of the 
philosophers the scattered traces of an incomplete truth, some- 
thing like a far-away participation in the Eternal Word. Several 
disciples of Plato receive baptism without laying aside the philos- 
opher’s cloak. One of them, St. Justin, opens at Rome the first 
school of orthodox philosophy ; he closes its doors, after a lapse 
of twenty-five years, only to seal with his blood the alliance 
thenceforth concluded between science and faith. Thus, in the 


very times of the persecutions, Christianity, already the ruler of 


18 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the future, of which it contains all the germs, binds to it the past, 
whether by the secret ascendancy which it exercises, or by the 
voluntary acceptance of the entire legitimate inheritance of the 
human mind. 

The conversion of Constantine hastened the course of events; 
he did not press them at once to their final conclusion. We 
must not think that the Czesars, when they became neophytes, 
carried the world with them: idolatry resisted; however, it sub- 
stituted apologies in the place of tortures; and the struggle 
beeame a diseussion. At the same period began the quarrel of 
Arianism. These two questions were agitated, not in an obscure 
corner of the world, but in the cities of the East, in Greece, and 
in the full daylight of Italy. All Rome was stirred at the pros- 
pect of the re-establishment of the altar of victory ; heresy 
deemed itself sovereign at the Council of Rimini. The fate of 
the human race was the question in dispute; ‘a fruitful perplexity 
stirred the human mind to its very depths; and in the furrow 
thus formed, sprang up a new: science, Theology. In its turn, 
literature ended hy following the other powers of the world: it 
became Christian, not without hesitations, not without profana- 
tions, not without sundry vicissitudes. The rhetoricians entered 
the Church; those were the days of Lactantius, of Victorinus, 
and of the most glorious of the’ deserters from the schools, St. 


Augustine. Africa asserted her claim to him. ~Rome-could not 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 19 


retain St. Jerome. But there remained to the Italians, St. Am- 
brose; and this fact suffices to mark the moment when in the 
same hands were united the two inheritances of human and 
divine letters. 

Tt was said that, like Plato, St. Ambrose had been visited in 
his eradle by bees, which had left their honey upon his lips. A 
young orator, brought up in the Roman schools, he had appeared 
with extraordinary applause in the courts of Milan. He still 
wore the purple-bordered robe of the magistrate when he was 
proclaimed bishop by the inspiration of the people. We cannot 
be astonished if the habits of secular eloquence appear in his 
discourses, if he remembers Cicero even when contending with 
him, if he writes hymns in the metres of Horace. The old 
national genius is still keeping watch with him when he saves 
the peace of the empire, when his words hold the tyrant Maxi- 

‘ 
mus in Treves, and when his letters stop on the Danubian frontier 
the conquering bands of the Marcomanni. Meanwhile the grace 
of the episcopate urges him onward and leaves him no repose; 
he takes part in all the controversies, all the dangers of his times. 
Symmachus and the deputies from the senate, when they ask for 
the restoration of their idols, find him on their way; and when 
the Arian Empress’s satellites seek to force the gates of the 
temple, he is found standing upon the threshold. Thus, all has 


its place in this great mind, and the same heart that led him to re- 


20 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


proach Theodosius with the massacre of Thessalonica, will induce 
him to sell the sacred vessels for the ransom of captives, and to 
shed abundant tears, weeping the death of a brother, or the fall 
of a sin-stricken virgin. 

Two other writers must detain us yet amoment. St. Paulinus, 
a disciple of the poet Ausonius, deserted the pagan muses and 
his rich possessions in Aquitaine, to pass his life in the shelter of 
the tomb of St. Felix of Nola. His pensive piety loved the beau- 
tiful sky of Campania, the devotions to a favored saint, pilgrim- 
ages frequented by a population that returned from them to lead 
better lives. But sacred literature followed him into his retreat; 
a few chosen souls shared it, and a lively correspondence kept up 
his relations with the most illustrious persons. One cannot deny 
him a share in the intellectual destinies of Italy, and in the 
affairs of christendom. 

Later, when the days of Rome were nearing their end, St. Leo 
the Great seemed to hold them back. This pontiff was called 
the Christian Demosthenes; in the pulpit, he recalled St. Paul, 
and in the pontifical chair, St. Peter. Italy had nothing stronger 
to oppose to the invasion of Attila. Three hundred thousand 
barbarians stopped at the passage of the Mincio, in the presence 
of the aged priest. A few years later, within the walls of Rome, 
he assuaged the fury of Genseric, obtaining from him the lives of 


the citizens and the preservation of buildings. We shall never 


In the Thirteenth Century. 21 


know how much courage and genius have been required to pre- 
serve until the present day, all that remain of the stones of that 
city on which was let loose the vengeance of the whole world. 
Thus the Church struggled against paganism and heresy, that 
minds might be set free, and at the same time kept back the 
barbarians, and prolonged the existence of the old civilization. 
The bishops relieved the weary legions of the care of the Empire. 
In the period of terror which preceded the fall of the Western 
throne, each year of delay was a benefit. Morals and manners, 
law and literature, needed time to prepare for themselves places of 
refuge. With the bishopries, centres of study were multiplied 
throughout Italy. Then must have commenced the parochial 
schools, mentioned in 529 (A. D.) by the Council of Vaison. 
Secular instruction had yielded to the influence of the general 
law, and the tradition of letters was thenceforth Christian. Yet 
it forsook neither its patriotic memories nor its devotion to great 
models. All the energy of the Roman accent was renewed in 
the songs of the poet Prudentius, when he placed on the lips of 
the martyr, St. Lawrence, the following hymn: ‘“O Christ! 
name like to no other under the sun, splendor and virtue of the 
Father, author of heaven, founder of these walls! Thou placedst 
Rome as a sovereign at the summit of earthly things, willing that 
the world should serve the people who bear the steel and wear 


the toga. Behold how the whole human race has passed under 


22 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the law of Remus. Hostile ways of life draw near to one 
another, and are blended together in thought and in word. O 
Christ! grant to Thy Romans that their city may be Christian, 
that city by which Thou hast given one and ihe same faith to all 
the cities of the earth. All the provinces are united in one creed; 
the world has yielded; may the imperial city yield in its turn! 


may Romulus be faithful, and Numa believe in Thee! ” 


Il. 


The invasion of the barbarians opens a third period when the 
succession of human things seems to be interrupted. Seven times 
in less than two centuries (404-557), did the northern hordes des- 
olate Italy. They followed one another so closely that five gen- 
erations were subjected to these terrors, and passed away, bear- 
ing with them that uncertainty regarding the future which de- 
stroys the power of laboring for it. As hope died, so were mem- 
ories blotted out. The antique world there ends, and there begins 
the modern world: it is a birth on the day following a death, and, 
in the darksome hour which separates the two, all transition dis- 
appears. 

However, amid these armed irruptions of which the disastrous 
effects cannot be denied, we may call to mind another fact not 
less considerable. I mean the pacific arrival of vast numbers of 


barbarians within the Roman empire After Cresar had Jed the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 23 


Germans at Pharsalia, they gradually filled the army as mercen- 
aries, country places as colonists, a variety of offices as citizens, 
until finally, when they had become consuls, patricians, prefects 
of the praetorium, sons-in-law to the emperors, they occupied so 
large a space that none was left for their masters. These stran- 
gers, half Romans, placed between the old inhabitants of Italy 
and its new conquerors; prevented a shock which must otherwise 
have reduced everything to dust and ashes; their regular domina- 
tion smoothed the passage from liberty to violence and oppres- 
sion. 

The two facts which we have just indicated, the pacific entrance 
and the violent invasion, characterize, in Italy, the successive 
conquests of the Goths and the Lombards. 

And-here we pause to recognize the reparative mission of The- 
odoric. His arrival in Italy was at first a legal reclamation, exer- 
cised against the Heruli, in the name of the Ceesar of Byzantium ; 
then, a peaceable taking possession, consented to by the senate 
and acquiesced in by the people. His benefactions restored the 
walls of the cities, their aqueducts, their amphitheatres, and the 
still more precious ruins of their liberties. The hierarchy of titles, 
of offices, and of magistracies, preserved its prestige; the laws 
regained their power. This leader of Germanie bands, who 
could sign his name only by means of a perforated plate of gold, 


did himself honor in wearing the purple; he gaye a Roman eode 


24 Danw, und Catholic Philosophy 


of laws to his disarmed warriors, surrounded himself with secre- 
taries, quaestors, and counts (comites), and discoursed with them 
concerning maxims of philosophy, the courses of the stars, the 
nature of rivers and seas. Rome lent to him her auspices, and he 
seemed to meditate the formation of a new Empire of the West, 
thus antedating by three centuries the work of Charlemagne. A 
general alliance was formed among the Germanic nations, under 
the patronage of the Gothic race, which then held the finest prov- 
inces of Europe. Thus was contact with Latin science and cus- 
toms civilizing a people who spoke an admirable language, and 
whose heroic memories were in themselves an epic poem. Who 
would not have predicted for this race a long historical destiny ? 
The dawn of a rising civilization began to break from the shores 
of the Adriatic to the pillars of Hercules. And yet, the mon- 
archy of the Goths in Italy lasted only sixty-nine years. The 
decisive cause of its ruin will not, I think, be hard to find. The 
heresy of Arius, that impotent and disputations doctrine, which 
lacked the courage to abide by the useful obscurities of faith, 
which loved the shadow of the throne and the protection of em- 
presses and eunuchs, did not possess the strength needed to up- 
hold a new society: it failed, and the new order of things fell 
from its grasp. 

In connection with Theodoric, appear two men to whom letters 


owe much, Boethius and Cassiodorus. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. Js 


Beethius still belongs to the past. Descended from the families 
of Anicius and Manlius, he unitedin his house all the memorials 
of the old patrician, all the honors of the republic. We see him 
on a certain day pass from the senate to the circus, and there, be- 
tween his two sons, consuls, surrounded by lictors, distribute the 
largesses of the prince to the assembled people, who fancy them- 
selves back in the times of the Czesars, once more enjoying bread 
and games (panem et circenses). During his infrequent leisure 
moments he visited in thought the schools of Greece; his trans- 
lations of Artistotle, and of the commentators of Artistotle, em- 
braced the entire system of the Peripatetics: thence, and especi- 
ally from a passage in his version of Porphyry, was one day to 
issue, with the controversy between the realists and the nominal- 
ists, the whole scholastic philosophy. On the other hand, his 
“Treatise on Consolation,” destined to achieve great popularity, 
and betimes translated into many tongues, was to introduce to the 
Middle Ages the ideas of Plato, regenerated by Christian mysti- 
cism. The sczence of antiquity received in his person the baptism 
of blood. He died amartyr. To this day, the people of Pavia 
kneel at his tomb, and the peasants of the valley of Chiayenna 
point out to the traveller the tower of Boethius. 

Cassiodorus fulfils another destiny: he stands nearer to the 
barbarians, nearer to the future. We meet him in the court of 


the conquerors, the historian of their exploits, the panegyrist of 


26 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


their reigns, in fine, the minister of Theodoric, of Amalasuntha, 
of Athalaric, of Theodatus, always employing their power to save 
whatever remained of enlightenment. The rescripts of the princes, 
drawn up by him, salute Rome with the imposing titles of City of 
Letters, Mother of Eloquence. Temple of Virtue. Through him the 
senate received the order to re-establish the public salary of the 
grammarians and rhetoricians. This man lived through one en- 
tire period of history. He buried the Gothic dynasty which he 
had inaugurated. But when the authority of kings escaped his 
grasp, he made for himself another and more lasting domination. 
Amid the wars of Belisarius and Totila, he sought shelter for his 
Latin penates beneath a Christian roof: he founded a monastery 
in his retreat at Vivaria; he enriched it with books, and peopled 
it with laborious monks,—copyists, translators, and compilers. 
He himself set the example; after having in his Institutions, 
Divine and Human, traced for them an encyclopedia of contem- 
poraneous learning, he thought of the less favored posterity which 
was to follow, and, at the age of ninety-three, penned a treatise 
on orthography. 

These admirable lives were not wasted in solitary efforts. The 
restored schools of the Capitol attracted a large number of stran- 
gers. An active correspondence united the literary men of Italy 
with those of Gaul; the orations of Ennodius shook the forum of 


Milan. And when the deacon, Arator, read in public the Acts of 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 27 


the Apostles versified, the clergy and people of Rome, assembled 
to hear him, filled during three days the church of St. Peter in 
vinculis. 

Other days began with the conquest of the Lombards. ‘“ That 
cruel nation, as a sword that had leaped from its seabbard, mowed 
down its harvest of the human race.” Incendiary bands of Arians 
and idolaters fell upon the conyeuts and the churches; the 
cities were sacked, the fields devastated, and wild beasts wan- 
dered in places previously inhabited by men. The ravagers went 
to the very walls of Rome to bear away citizens into slavery. 
Within, consternation reigned. Terror caused the disappearance 
of the magistracies, the senate, the people, all those great shadows 
of great things. Amid the universal dismay, the sovereign pon- 
tiff himself, interrupting the course of his homilies, left his pulpit 
because life had become burdensome to him. The Fathers, in a 
council at the Lateran, held in 680, confessed that none among 
them ‘claim to excel in profane eloquence, for the fury of many 
tribes has desolated these provinces, and, surrounded by bar- 
barians, the servants of God, reduced to live by the labor of their 
hands, lead lives filled with care and anguish.” It was during 
those two centuries of misery, when Italy, torn to pieces by the 
kings, the Lombard dukes, and the Byzantine exarchs, knew no 
repose, that amid the silence of thought and the crash of falling 


ruins, letters might have perished ;— then or never. 


28 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


They were saved by Monasticism and the Papacy. The genius 
of Italy, upheld by these two tutelary institutions, weathered 
the storm. 

Monasticism had received its organization on the eve of the 
danger. The austerities of the Thebaid had long before found 
courageous imitators in the West; but these bands of cenobites 
were still awaiting a common law. Under the reign of the Goths 
and toward the year 500 (A. D.), certain shepherds of Subiaco, 
clearing away the brambles from the entrance to a neighboring 
eave wherein they thought they had seen a wild beast stirring, 
discovered a young man; soon, judging of him by the gentleness 
of his words, they took him for an angel. Benedictus was his 
name. [dueated in the Roman schools, wearied with the sordid- 
ness of the care of terrestrial things, he had fled to the wilderness. 
Numerous penitents soon gathered under his direction. The cells 
of Monte Cassino rose upon the ruins of a temple of Apollo, the 
last refuge of paganism. Thence was it that the man of God was 
to send forth his disciples to the extremities of Sicily and of Gaul, 
the beginning of that beneficent invasion which was to overrun 
Christendom. Ji is said that one night, when his monks were 
asleep, and he watched alone in a tower of the monastery, as he 
looked forth upon the heavens he beheld around him a great 
brightness, and he saw the whole world illumined by a ray of 


sunlight. That ray of light was the Bencdictinerule. It was 


In the Thirteenth Century. 29 


humble and short; but it embraced labor, which subjugates the 
earth ; prayer, which is mistress of heaven; and charity, which 
conquers men; it thus restored to humanity the empire of itself 
and of all things else. The rule provided for the maintenance of 
a conventual library, and soon usage joined to this the function of 
tuition. The charters deposited in the archives became tlic 
landmarks of the first chronicles. The legends of the saints 
threw athwart their pages the beams ofa new poetry. From the 
time of the second generation, Monte Cassino had its history. 
From another quarter, and in the North of Italy, even amid the 
much-feared Lombards, the monastic colony of St. Columbanus 
(612) brought to Bobbio the learned traditions of Ireland. Thus 
was the sacred fire of letters kept up under the care of the aus- 
tere virginity of the cloister. Whatis there astonishing in the 
fact that the monks preserved antiquity? They were themselves 
antiquity. They spoke its language, wore its garments, kept the 
form of its habitations. If it had been given to Pythagoras to re- 
turn and visit the shores of his beloved Magna Greecia, when he 
beheld the pious republics founded by St. Benedict and considered 
their life in community, their silence, the grave, cloaked figures 
pacing the porticos, he might have thought he had come upon 
his own schools. And yet, the two institutions were divided 
from one another by the entire breadth of Christianity. These 


were the men who were to renew the face of Europe by faith, by 


30 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


learning, and by the cultivation of the soil. Detached from time, 
they were of all times; monks were to be eternal men. 

About the same time (590-604), the Papacy attained to all its 
potency in the person of St. Gregory the Great, a heroic priest 
raised up to meet the perils of those evil days. Whilst the walls 
of Rome, shaken by continual assaults, threatened to fall upon 
him, his thoughts were at the ends of the earth; in the East, re- 
pelling the enterprises of the Byzantine court; in the North, con- 
verting the Anglo-Saxons; in the West, completing the overthrow 
of Arianism among the Visigoths of Spain. His discourses on 
the freeing of slaves, his reform of the Church Chant, and his 
writings, still held as among the bases of theological instruction, 
accomplished much in the interest of future times. He has been 
accused of wishing to blot out the memory of the antique ages by 
the destruction of books, but no one now believes the solitary 
and equivocal testimony of John of Salisbury, who lived six hun- 
dred years later. That pontiff, who has been set down as inimi- 
cal to letters, made the study of them obligatory for the priest- 
hood ; under his auspices, the most learned clerics mingled with 
the most pious monks. The son of a senator, he had himself 
leld the office of praetor, and something of the old patrician 
always still clung to him. ‘None of those who served him,” 
says the contemporary biographer, ‘had anything barbarous 


either in their language or in their dress. Latinity was there to 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 31 


be recognized whether under the trabea or the toga; it was a 
Latin palace, where Latin customs were retained.” Boethius has 
been called the last of the Romans; thisname, which again others 
bestow upon Brutus, I should give to St. Gregory the Great, did I 
not see after him the character of the masters of the world reap- 
pear in some of those illustrious Popes of whom the procession 
will not be closed by Gregory VII. I do not see, the world has 
not yet seen, the last of the Romans. 

Contemporary historians extol the learning of St. Martin, Leo IT., 
Gregory III., and Zachary: their epistles stand in proof. Rome 
had not ceased to be the centre of affairs of all nations. She con- 
tinued to stamp the she-wolf of Romulus upon her .coin. The 
Papacy did not hand over to the barbarians the keys of the city. 
Learned ecclesiastics from England and from Asia met within her 
precincts. In 690, there came to Rome a monk of Tarsus, named 
Theodore, a pupil of the schools of Atheus; this monk was des- 
tined to bear with him ancient literature to the archiepiscopal see 
of Canterbury. The teaching of grammar, that is to say, of liter- 
ature, continued in the city; the Vatican library, meagre as it 
might be, sent Greek inanuscripts of Aristotle to Pepin the Short. 
The basilicas were enriched with mosaics and paintings. The in- 
defatigable activity of the human mind showed itself in the ad- 
mirable controversies sustained by the theologians of Italy with 


the Monothelites and the Iconoclasts. But civilization was above 


32 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


all perpetuated by that which is its most faithful depository, 
namely, by the languages. The Roman Church bore to the 
northern nations the ancient idiom of the proconsuls, disputed 
with Constantinople in the language of St. John Chrysostom, and 
carefully gathered together the primitive texts of the Scriptures. 
In consecrating by solemn adoption Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, 
she saved whatever there was of most eminent in the past, the 
genius of Latium, of Greece, and of the Orient. 

And thus likewise, tradition perished not. It was preserved in 
the Church, and hence in Christendom. Amid the obscurity 
which extends from the seventh to the eighth century, the human 
mind did not destroy its work of so many years. The Sovereign 
Artificer wrought in silence; or, if He seemed to slumber for a 
moment, the Church watched for Him, calling to our memory the 
legend of the pious artist, who, on awaking, found the interrupt- 
ed picture of the preceding evening finished by unseen hands. 

IV. 

At length, by the blending together of the ancient civiliza- 
tion, of Christianity, and of the barbarians, a new society is 
formed. It is founded on the concord of the priesthood and the 
empire; it is developed even amid their discords: we must follow 
it until it finds its expression in a new literature. 

The society of the Middle Ages was constituted on the day 


when Charlemagne, kneeling at the tomb of the holy apostles, 


Ln the Thurteenth Century. 3 


ios) 


received the crown from the hands of Leo IIJ., while the assem- 
bled multitude cried out: ‘Long life and victory to Charles 
Augustus, crowned by God, the great and pacific emperor of the 
Romans!” Then was realized the idea of a universal monarchy, 
heir of the Czesars, and consecrated by Christianity, which was 
to extend equally over both Latin and German nations, and which, 
to express this alliance of all the ages, was to be called the Holy 
Roman Empire. The great man well knew the extent of the 
rights subsisting beneath the folds of this purple, and, by a ca- 
pitulary of 802 (A. D.), he required, in virtue of his imperial title, 
a new oath of fidelity from those who had done homage to him 
simply as king. 

Charlemagne had found power in Italy; he there found learn- 
ing also. When he visited Rome for the first time (774), the 
school children went out a mile beyond the walls to meet him: 
letters recognized their protector. They accompanied him 
throughout his entire progress; the capture of Pavia gave to him 
Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa; later, at Parma, he met 
Alcuin. The Popes supplied him with skilful masters in the 
seven arts, to the end that the study of grammar, calculation, and 
singing might be properly pursued in France. A Lombard cleric, 
named Theodulph, with no patronage save his knowledge of the- 
ology and his Latin verses, became bishop of Orleans (7nissus 


dominicus) and one of the grandees of the realm. Thus did learr- 


34 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ed men from the Peninsula emigrate beyond the Alps, in order 
to assist in that restoration of human knowledge which the great 
emperor had in his mind when he asked from Heaven twelve men 
like St. Jerome and St. Augustine that the face of the earth 
might be renewed. 

Italy seemed exhausted by the effort she had made. Her 
southern provinces, divided between the Greeks and the dukes of 
Beneventum, and invaded by the Saracens, did not share in the 
beneficial unity of the empire. Soon, the decadence of the Carlo- 
vingian dynasty, the civil wars which ensued, the profanation 
of the Holy See, and the invasion of the Huns, proved a series of 
disasters equaling the horrors of the preceding age. During the 
long years that elapsed until the reign of Otho the Great, we are 
tempted to ask if antiquity has survived through such great la- 
bors, and if Christianity has grown by the fostering of such emi- 
neut genius, only to perish together through the evils of the times 
and the corruption of men. 

However, upon closer inspection, we find light amid the chaos, 
and its indications are more numerous than during the preceding 
centuries. A law of Lothaire established schools in the nine 
principal cities, which schools proved so many centres of instrue- 
tion for Tuscany, the Marches, Lombardy, and Friuli. In 826, 
A. D., a Roman council, held by Eugene II.. decreed that in epis- 


copal seats, and, when needful, in places depending on them, 


In the Thirteenth Century. 35 


pains be taken to maintain masters for the teaching of letters, 
“seeing that such knowledge is especially useful in furthering 
the study of the Divine Law.” This decree was renewed in 853. 
Some years later, when Louis II. visited Beneventum (870), there 
were there, according to the chronicler, thirty-vwo philosophers, 
of whom the most renowned was the, in truth, very little re- 
nowned, Hilderic. One author of these days groans over seeing 
poetry descend among the crowd. The demon of Latin verses 
possessed men even in country places: 
Hoc faciunt urbi: hoe quoque ruri. 

More useful labors consecrate the memory of Bertharius, abbot 
of Monte Cassino, of Bishop Hatto, and of Anastasius the Libra- 
rian, who extracted the annals of the papacy from the acts of the 
martyrs and the Church archives that they might take their place 
in history. Whenatlength Otho the Great took up the interrupted 
projects of Charlemagne, it was again to Italy that he looked for 
the instruments of his designs. By his orders, Luitprand, bishop 
of Cremona, undertook the embassy to Constantinople, of which 
he has left us so remarkable an account. We see therein the old 
age of the Byzantine empire, obstinate in its haughty isolation, 
when indeed Europe had begun to need it no longer. Toward 
the same epoch, a cleric of Novara, called to the German court, 
stopped at the convent of St. Gall. Accompanied by a library of 


a hundred volumes, Greek and Latin, and prepared on numerous 


30 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


questions which he had laid out for discussion, he purposed to 
put to the proof and to astound the monks of the learned abbey. 
But, in the ardor of dispute, as he himself says: ‘‘ betrayed by the 
custom of speaking the vulgar tongue,” he let fall a solecism, to 
the great delight of the German Latinists. The ultramontane was 
satirized; the tale was noised abroad in all the monasteries. 
Gunzo deemed the occurrence worthy of an apology, and, in the 
letter in which he excuses his misfortune, we curiously enough, 
amid the display of classical erudition, come upon one of the first 
vestiges of modern Italian. 

Otho II. gave back to Italy more than she had lent to him; he 
gave to the Holy See, Sylvester II., who re-opens the series of 
great popes. The times that were in preparation called for noth- 
ing mediocre. 

When the quarrel broke out between the priesthood and the 
empire, the Cesar was Henry IV.,a scion of that Salic house 
whose violent domination threatened Germany with a return to 
barbarism. Of the traditions of the Roman monarchy, he knew 
nothing but the zeal for the interests of the public treasury; he 
represented rather the old German kingship, upheld by the power 
of the feudal system. The head ofa military aristocracy, he held 
to it the bishops, by the bond of investiture, which made of the 
Church a fief, and the priests, by concubinage, which would have 


made of the priesthood a caste. Thus would these two orders, 


In the Thirteenth Century. a7 


the nobility and the clergy, have pressed with all their weight 
upon Christian society. On the other side, the true imperial gen- 
ius, the genius for government, which emancipates and enlightens, 
was at Rome in the counsels of the papacy, in the thoughts of 
Gregory VII. This Italian monk had inherited from the old 
Romans all the power of the law, minus arms, and plus faith. 
From the depths of the Lateran palace, where he was besieged, 
now by the seditious multitude, and now by the anathema of a 
schismatie convyenticle, he made all the provinces of the West 
yield to the uniformity of the ecclesiastical law and conquered 
the obstinate resistance of Germany. When the German em- 
peror went to Canossa and humbled himself before the pontiff, 
this was again the triumph of civilization over the barbarian world. 

When thus guiding the destinies of the Church, Gregory VII. 
and his successors were serving the cause of letters; in many 
ways did they advance it. 

And firstly, we do not subscribe to the common saying that the 
arts are born and flourish best in times of peace. If there are, 
as we have seen, wars of extermination, invasions and tyrannies 
which crush intelligences beneath the brutal reign of force, it is 
otherwise with those memorable contests which employ force in 
the service of great interests, and consequently, in that of great 
ideas. The human mind delights in struggles which call forth 


the discussion of great questions; it grows in the midst of per- 


38 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


plexities ; it needs the severe conditions without which nothing 
is productive, suffering and sorrow. The ages of Pericles and 
Augustus were the offspring of Salamis and Pharsalia. The dis- 
pute concerning investitures awoke scholasticism. Men were 
forced to choose between excommunication and the ban of the 
empire ; hence, men were obliged to think. The triumph of the 
papacy gave rise to the crusades; like all civilizing wars, they 
were to be saluted with canticles. 

In the second place, the popes, who made every effort to re- 
form the clergy, did not neglect the potent aid of learning. They 
sought to insure the independence of the priesthood by conferring 
on it a possession which the feudal sceptre had no power to 
transmit,—enlightenment. They exalted the dignity of the priest 
by the enforcement of the law of celibacy; but, when depriving 
him of family joys, other consolations were to be found to give 
honor to his solitude; letters were seated at his hearthstone. 
The Roman council of 1078 reminded Christendom of the decrees 
which had instituted chairs for instruction in the liberal arts in 
connection with cathedral churches. This impulsion was deci- 
sive, and Italy sustained it by a glorious concurrence. Three 
men, Lanfrane, St. Anselm, and Peter Lombard, went to the 
north of Europe to inaugurate the revival of learning. Lanfrane 
gave to dialectics greater exactness, the writings of St. Anselm 


restored to metaphysics the vigor of its flight, while the Sentences 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 39 


of Peter Lombard lent to theology the excellent forma which later 
seemed to be fixed forever in the Summa of St. Thomas. Their 
lessons aroused the spirit of philosophy in France; their disciples 
opened the great school, whither forty thousand students thronged 
from the four quarters of the world, where clashing opinions 
claimed armies of adherents, where finally, the entire learned life 
of the Middle Ages came into play with a freedom until then 
unknown. 

In course of time, the Italian cities, united under the patronage 
of the sovereign pontificate against the oppression of the feuda- 
tory bishops and the imperial deputies, also engaged in the wars 
for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Whilst the Lombard 
league avenged the ruins of Milan and dictated the peace of Con- 
stance, the ships of Pisa, of Venice, and of Genoa, returning from 
the East, brought the poetic breath of Asia in the folds of their 
sails. The victorious cities hastened to take possession of the 
soil by the erection of monuments which should bear witness to 
their sovereignty: the domes of St. Mark arose from the Adria- 
tic. Other communities begin to set down their history at this 
page. The Senate of Genoa commands one of its consuls to write 
the annals of the republic; the chronicles of Lodi, of Como, and 
of Cremona, are drawn up. The old Roman municipalities, as 
they rebuild their walls. revive their laws; jurisprudence again 


flourishes in the schools of Mantua, Piacenza, Padua, and Modena. 


4O Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


These are the days that witness the commencement of the Uni- 
versity of Bologna. The same movement is felt to the very ends 
of the Peninsula. The Normans in Sicily erect the gilded basilica 
of Montereale, and tell in verse the deeds of their kings. The in- 
terests of learning are bound up with those of the fatherland, art 
gathers inspiration from the people, and teaches them to under- 
stand its utterances; all that blooms has a new sap and deeper 
roots. We perceive those beginnings of organization and sensi- 
bility which are the signs of life: a new genius is on the eve of 
birth, his language must be prepared for him. 

Between the classic language of the learned and the rustic dia- 
lects which were not written, Italy had at first a barbarous Latin, 
of which the first traces have been sought out in the comedies of 
Plautus and in the Christian inscriptions. It would be useful to 
follow, as M. Fauriel has done in learned lessons, the vicissitudes 
of that mobile language, modified by usage and by the exigencies 
of the times, which held sway in familiar preaching and in pub- 
lie acts, and which, during several centuries, sufficed for the 
wants of the human mind. On the other hand, Provengal poetry 
had penetrated into Lombardy under favor of the alliances bind- 
ing together the nobility of the two regions. We early in the day 
see troubadours visiting the feudal courts of Montferrat, Este, 
Verona, and Malaspina. Bernard de Ventadour receives the crown 


of poetry in the cathedral of Bologna. At the same time, the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 41 


French language, introduced by the Norman conquest into the 
southern provinces, is retained, and becomes popular. It is the 
only language spoken at the court of Palermo down to the reign 
of William I. Into it are translated the Latin books which the 
lords of the land can no longer read in the original; Marco Polo 
makes use of it that the narrative of his adventures may reach 
the grandees. St. Francis asks alms in French at the doors of 
the Vatican basilica, and Sordello shows himself a skilful versi- 
fier, no less in langue d@’ Oil than in langue d’Oc. So many exam- 
ples finally emboldened that beautiful Italian tongue, which, two 
hundred years after its birth, had not yet dared to appear in the 
world of letters. The thirteenth century was ushered in by songs 
of a harmony until then unknown. The freemen of Florence and 
of Siena exchanged love verses with the Sicilian courtiers of 
Frederic ITI., while amid the Umbrian hills was heard the canticle 
of St. Francis of Assisi: The people were amazed that they 
could comprehend. From the banks of the Arno tothe Pharos of 
Messina, the voices were repeated as if by so many echoes; they 
recognized each other as speaking one and the same language, 
and human thought possessed in the world one admirable instru- 
ment the more. 

And here ends this study; for at this stage we already see 
Ricordano Malespini gathering together the documents for the first 


history written in popular prose; Brunetto Latini pens the first 


42 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


long poem in the common tongue; and these are the friends and 
the teachers of Dante. This last name warns us that antiquity 


is not destroyed, but that modern times have begun. 
V. 


Thus, letters never perished. And thus, the period of complete 
barbarism, which was first presumed to extend over a term of a 
thousand years, from the fall of the Roman empire to the taking 
of Constantinople, and which was gradually reduced until it was 
held to cover only the seventh and the tenth centuries, vanishes 
before a closer examination. ‘ Barbarism might usurp, it never 
ruled exclusively. A continual protest preserved the rights of 
learning. I do not find the universal-ignorance deplored by con- 
temporary writers; and, for the very reason that many deplore 
it so eloquently, I fail to believe in it. The human intellect has 
had this honor, that the ruin of the ancient world and the 
irruption of invading hordes have not been able to prevail against 
it. Providence, in whose counsels nothing is insignificant, 
vutched over the destiny of art as well as over the mutations of 
the nations. The world was never left without some luminous 
centre whereat it might re-light its torches. Only times which 
have faith neither in God nor in man, only impious ages, believe 
in an eternal night. 

Impiaque eeternam timuerunt seecula noctem. 


This point solidly established will serve to bring out a literary 


In the Thirteenth Century. 43 


doctrine long unrecognized, which doctrine is, that two things 
are necessary for the perfecting of art: on one side the freedom 
of inspiration which comes and goes, differing according to times 
and places; on the other, the authority of tradition, which is 
continued in instruction, in criticism, and in the learned languages. 
On one hand, genius; on the other, labor. Genius is a gift, and 
the few periods which really possess it attain their glory only 
through the austere discipline of labor, throagh a long apprentice- 
ship under tuition. Labor is a law: courageously pursued, there 
is no time so miserable that it cannot derive honor from it. Care- 
ful work may even console society for temporary absence of gen- 
ius, since labor facilitates the re-appearance of genius by holding 
for it the place it has left. 

Thus it is that we may trace in history the course of learning, 
even as Bossuet there traced the course of religion and of empire. 
The law of labor is also the law of the hereditary succession 
which it preserves, and of the progress which it prepares. Knowl- 
cdee ean advance only by staying itself upon acquired certain- 
ties; the arts are illumined only by the light afforded by great 
models. Amid the inexhaustible variety of his works, we see 
the mind of man pursue one and the same end, seeking beauty, 
truth, justice. We find a design traced on high which is carried 
out here below by a series of laborers. And thus again is demon- 


strated the unity, the solidarity of the human race, a Christian 


44 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


dogma, toward which now tend all the conclusions of science. 

The continuity between pagan antiquity and Christian times, 
which appeared to be interrupted, was really preserved in Italy. 
That beautiful country, situated on the Mediterranean, the centre 
of communication of the various parts of the world, subjected to 
vicissitudes which never allowed it to constitute one distinet na- 
tion, truly seems destined to some nobler function in the interest 
of the whole of mankind. Italy is the organ of Rome, and Rome is 
the immortal depository of the political, literary, and religious 
tradition of the world. She educated those western peoples, long 
known as the Latin races, who, imbued with the Latin faith, 
Latin law, and the Latin language, have everywhere left their in- 
effaceable imprint. Our entire civilization is moulded by Rome. 
Thus do the destinies of the whole of humanity rest upon that 
mysterious city, and we must say with the great writer whom we 
are about to study: ‘No farther proof is needed to show that 
an especial providence of God has presided over the birth and the 
greatness of this holy city; and Iam firmly persuaded that the 
stones of its walls are entitled to respect, and the ground on 
which it stands is worthy of veneration beyond anything that 
men have said or believed.” 

It is because he understood the destiny of Italy that Dante be- 
came the national poet, and at the same time the poet of Christen- 


dom. While inspiration never descended upon more eloquent 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 45 


lips, never did tradition find a more faithful heir. Dante, great 
as he was for having dared so much, was perliaps still greater 
by reason of having known so much. During six hundred years 
commentators have not ceased to study the Divine Comedy, and 
consequently to learn from its pages. It has been treated as we 
treat the Iliad and the Auneid; and I wonder neither at the admira- 
tion nor at the persevering labor bestowed upon it. There is, in 
fact, an inexhaustible subject of study in the great epics or 
Homer, of Virgil, and of Dante, for the reason that they represent 
three momentous eras in the history of the world: Greek antiq- 
uity in its budding, the destiny of Rome binding the old times 
with the new, and the Middle Age which touches upon our own 
day. It is this which makes at the present moment the popular- 
ity of the Divine Comedy, and assures to it, not a passing favor, 
not a triumph of reaction, as some say, but a serious attraction, a 
permanent authority. What we look for in it is history—the 
genius of the thirteenth century, the genius of the troubadours, 
of the Italian republics, of the theological school, of St. Thomas 
Aquinas. This it is that holds an innumerable auditory at the 
feet of the old poet. When I behold this multitude of readers, 
interpreters, and imitators, Dante seems to me well avenged. To 
the exile, who had not where to lay his head, who experienced 
how bitter is the bread of the stranger, and how hard it is to as- 


cend and descend the stairways of other men, flock a crowd of 


46 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


the obscure or the illustrious, asking the bread of the word, and, 
in his turn, he will make all generations of men of letters ascend 
and descend by his stairways, by the steps of his Inferno, his 
Purgatorio, his Paradiso. And we, we also are his people; hence 
we shall not consider wasted the time we may devote to the 
doing of something in his service, and consequently in the further- 
ance of the great cause which he served—the cause of religion, 


liberty, and letters. 


INTRODUCTION. 


ee) HEN the pilgrimage to Rome, so often dreamed of, is 
A 





Is finally realized, and the traveller, impelled by a pious cu- 

riosity, has ascended the great staircase of the Vatican, 
and has surveyed the wonders of every age and of every country 
gathered together under favor of the hospitality of that magniticent 
residence, he reaches a spot that may fitly be called the sanctuary 
of Christian art, the Stanze of Raphael. The artist, in a series of 
historical and symbolic frescos, has there depicted the glories and 
the benefactions of the Catholic faith. Among those frescos is one 
on which the eye rests most lovingly, both by reason of the beauty 
of the subject and the felicity of the execution. The Holy Knu- 
charist is there represented on an altar lifted up between heayen 
and earth; heaven opens, and amid its splendor permits us to see 
the Divine Trinity, the angels, and the saints; the earth beneath 
is crowned by a numerous assemblage of pontiffs and doctors of 
the Church. In one of the groups composing the assemblage, the 
spectator distinguishes a figure remarkable by the originality of 


its character, its head encircled, not by a tiara or a mitre, but by 
47 


48 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


a wreath of laurel. The countenance is noble and austere, no- 
wise unworthy of such company. A momentary glance into the 
memory brings to mind Dante Alighieri. 

The question then naturally rises, by what right has the por- 
trait of such a man been introduced among those of the vener- 
ated witnesses of the faith, and that by an artist accustomed to 
the scrupulous observance of liturgical traditions, under the eyes 
of the popes, in the very citadel of orthodoxy ? 

The reply to the question is inferred at sight of the almost re- 
ligious honors paid by Italy to the memory of the man, honors 
which announce him to have been something more than a great 
poet. The shepherds of Aquileia still show on the bank of the 
Tolmino a rock which they call Dante's seat, where he often came 
to meditate on the thoughts suggested by exile. The dwellers in 
Verona delight in pointing out the church of St. Helen, where, as a 
traveller, he tarried to sustain a public thesis. Ina monastery of 
Camaldolesi, shadowed by the wild hills of Gubbio, a carefully- 
preserved bust recalls the fact that he there found several months 
of solitude and repose. Ravenna, nobly jealous, keeps his ashes. 
But Florence, especially, has surrounded with expiatory honors 
all that remains to her of him: the roof which sheltered his head, 


the stone whereon he was accustomed to sit. She has even 





1 Pelli, Memorie per la vita di Dante, at the end of the ‘‘ Works of 
Dante,”’ Zatta’s edition.—A mori di Dante, by F. Arrivatene. 


In the Thirteentn Century. 49 


awarded to him a species of apotheosis, by making Giotto repre- 
sent him, clad in triumphal robes and with crowned head, under 
one of the porticos of the metropolitan church, almost among the 
patron saints of the city. 

Monuments of another kind afford a still more explicit testi- 
mony. Such are the public chairs founded in the fourteenth 
century at Florence, Pisa, Piacenza, Venice, and Bologna, for the 
interpretation of the Divine Comedy: and such also are the com- 
mentaries on the poem which occupied the time of the gravest per- 
sons, as for example, the Archbishop of Milan, Visconti, who em- 
ployed for this work two citizens of Florence, two theologians, 
and two philosophers; or the bishop, John of Serravalle, who de- 
voted toalike labor his leisure hours when attending the Council 
of Constance.! The finest minds of Italy bow reverently before 
this elder brother: Boccaccio, Villani, Marsilius Ficinus, Paulus 
Jovius, Varchi, Gravina, Tiraboschi, have all greeted Dante with 
the title of philosopher. The unanimous opinion of his day, for- 
mulated in a line which has become proverbial, proclaimed him as 
both a doctor of divine verities and a sage who permitted nothing 
human to escape him: 


Theologus Dantes, nullius dogmatis expers.’ 








1 Foscolo, Edinburg Review, v. XXIX. Tirabo chi, History, vol. V. 

2 See the epitaph composed by Giov. del Virgilio.—Boceaccio, Vita di 
Dante. Gioy. Villani, History, Bk. 1X. Marsilius Ficinus, Epist. Inter 
Clarorum Virorum Epist., Rome, 1754. Paulus Jovius, Elog., ¢. iv. p. 19. 
Varehi, Ercolano. Gravina, della Ragion poetica. 


50 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


These friendly voices found echoes beyond the Alps. One of the 
first French translators of the Divine Comedy thus expresses him- 
self in the dedication of his work to Henry 1V.: “Sire, I do not 
fear to affirm that this sublime poem ought by no means to be 
placed with sundry compositions that the divine Plato compares 
to the garden-plots of the beautiful Adonis, which, springing up 
ina single day, fade away and die as rapidly. In this noble poem we 
tind an excellent poet. a profound philosopher, and a judicious 
theologian.” ? German criticism has pronounced a similar verdict. 
Brucker recognizes Dante as * the first among the moderns with 
whom the Platonic muses, after seven hundred years of exile, 
found an asylum; a thinker equal to the most renowned of his 
contemporaries, a sage who deserved to be numbered among the 
reformers of philosophy. 7’? 

But such is among us, perishable creatures that we are, the fra- 
gility of memory and the short reach of glory, that ordinarily after 
a few centuries, little remains to us but the mere name of those 
who have most honored humanity. Such names often attain im- 
mortality through the action of a traditional but ignorant admira- 
tion, like to the legendary dolphin which bore over the waves in- 
differently a mocking animal or an inspired poet. If these indo- 
lent courtesies of posterity sometimes profit persons of little worth, 


q Dedication of the Abbe Grangier’s translation. 
? Brucker, Hist. critic. philos., Period 3, Part I., Bk. I., Ch. I. See also 
F. Scblegel, History of Literature, Book II., Chap. I. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 51 


more often they wrong great men. It appears as if due justice 
had heen rendered to such men, because, on oceasion, they receive 
a tribute of common praise, while in fact their most precious titles 
to honor remain buried in the dust. So that, if they could sud- 
denly rise from their graves, we do not know which feeling would 
most affect them, indignation at being misknown, or pride at being 
so surrounded by homage, even when so little really understood. 

Dante has passed through the experience of these strange 
vicissitudes of human glory. The work of so many vigils and of 
such loving care, to which he devoted his life and by which he 
conquered death, the Divine Comedy, has, after the lapse of six 
hundred years, come down to us, but with the loss of a portion 
of its philosophic interest, that is to say, with the loss of that 
part of it which the author esteemed the most highly. 

Among those who are called cultivated persons, many know, 
of the entire poem, only the Inferno, and of the Inferno, only the 
msceription on the entrance, the episode of Francesea da Rimini. 
and the death of Ugolino. The singer of the resignedly-borne 
pains of Purgatory, the narrator of the triumphant visions of Par- 
adise, seems to them but a sinister apparition, one bugbear the 
more amid the fabled darkness of the thirteenth century, already 
peopled by so many phantoms. Others, more highly instructed, 
have not been more just: Thus Voltaire sees in the Divine 


Comedy merely ‘‘an odd work, yet resplendent with natura) 


52 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


beauties, wherein the author lifts himself, in the details, above 
the bad taste of his age and his subject.” If the critics of our 
own day have approached the reading of the poem with more 
serious dispositions, some haye found in it only the record of a 
piously romantie passion, and others a political manifesto written 
under the dictation of revenge. For both these classes, the nu- 
inerous passages relating to dogma are nothing but the parasitic 
vegetation of a too fertile mind, in fact, the ill weeds of that con- 
temporary learning which struck root everywhere.? Finally, the 
historians of philosophy, while allowing all that pertains to it in 
this vast composition, have contented themselves with announe- 
ing the thesis, without entering into the controversy, thus lead- 
ing us to think that they have underestimated the importance of 
the result. And yet it was tothem, it was to meditative minds, 
free from the contagion of error, that the old poet appealed, when, 
interrupting his narrative, he thought with sadness upon those 
who would not comprehend him, and cried out with a nobly sup- 
pliant voice : 
‘*O ye who have sound minds, 


Mark well the doctrine that conceals itself 


Beneath the veil of the mysterious verses! ’’ 5 





1 Essai sur les moeurs. 

2 Ginguene Alistoire de la litterature italienne, vol. II.—M. Villemain 
(vol. I. of his course) was the first to point out the numerous aspects under 
which the genius of Dante may be contemplated. 

3 Inferno, cant. ix., terz. 21. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 53 


Thus, in proposing to set forth in clearer light the PHILOSOPHY 
oF DANTE, we do not pretend to point out a fact hitherto unper- 
ceived, but to insist upon a fact too much neglected. The am- 
bition of discovery is not ours. We have thought we should be 
doing as much as our powers would permit, and also, something 
for the advancement of knowledge, if we were to seek out some 
datum furnished by respectable authorities, and follow it through 
its developments, which may offer more than one species of in- 
terest. 

° 

And first, of all things in the Middle Ages, the most calumni- 
ated, and the last to find rehabilitation, is its philosophy.’ Ig- 
norance in regard to it aroused contempt, and contempt in turn 
encouraged ignorance. It has been represented to us as speak- 
ing a barbarous language, as pedantic in its form. and monkish in 
its spirit. Under so unfavorable an exterior, we readily fancied 
it entirely confined to theological studies, and often given over to 
profitless speculations or endless controversies. It seemed to us 
that Leibnitz lad treated the School with great indulgence when he 
assured us that we might find gcld amid its refuse. But here (in 
Dante) is a philosophy expressed in the most melodious language 


of Europe, in a popular idiom comprehended by women and chil- 








1 This rehabilitation, commenced by the lessons of M. Cousin (History 
of Philosophy, Lesson IT.), has been greatly forwarded by the recent pub- 
lication of the works of Abelard, and by the learned researches accom- 
panying them. 


54 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


dren. Its lessons are canticles, recited to princes to charm their 
leisure hours, and repeated by artisans to refresh their souls 
after labor. We here find it free from the accompaniments of 
the School and the restrictions of the cloister, blending itself with 
the sweetest mysteries of the heart, the noisiest contests of the 
public square: it is familiar, laic, and wholly popular. Tf we try 
to follow the course of its explorations, we find it setting out 
from a profound study of human nature, constantly advancing, 
extending its guesses over the entire creation, and in the end, 
but only in the end, losing itself in the contemplation of the De- 
ity. We find it everywhere a foe to dialectic subtleties, using 
abstractions most soberly and only as necessary formulas to co- 
ordinate positive knowledge, little given to dreaming, and less 
concerned with the reform of opinions than with the reformation 
of morals. Then, if we inquire into the origin of this philosophy, 
we learn that it was born in the shadow of the chair of scholas- 
tie doctrines, that it gives itself out as their interpreter, that it 
proves its mission and glories in it. We have here, doubtless, a 
phenomenon remarkable in itself, but there may be still more be- 
hind: the pupil, perchance, may reconcile us with his teachers; 
we may even seat ourselves at their feet. Accumulated preju- 
dices may be dissipated, and their dispersion will enable us to 
recognize a vast gap in the history of learning; a gap now well 


known, and soon to be filled. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 55 


There are prejudices of another kind which it is no less impor- 
tunt to set aside. There are many now-a-days who deem poetry 
merely an affair of art, who see in it only a relative beauty result- 
ing from the triple harmony of the thoughts, of the thoughts 
with the words, and of the words among themselves. These 
light-minded souls make no account of the logical value of thought, 
nor of the moral significance of words. Art is to them a mere 
source of pleasure, without any ulterior aim, for the reason that 
to them life is a pageant without serious meaning; they are held 
captive in the visible world within portals closed for them by 
sensualism and doubt. Their traditions are those of sundry poets 
of antiquity, and of some of modern times, who sing only of sensa- 
tions and passions, and whose greatest triumph is to arouse in 
those who listen to them terror and pity, affections for the most 
part sterile. Hence the indifference which in our day greets so 
many poetical efforts; hence the rancor of neglected authors; and 
hence also, if we may so phrase it, that reciprocal isolation of 
literature and of society which prevents their uniting for their 
mutual vivification. Now, here is a poet who appeared in a 
tumultuous age, who lived as if enveloped in storms. Yet, be- 
hind the moving shadows of life, he divined immutable realities. 
Led by reason and by faith, he outstrips time, penetrates into the 
invisible world, there takes possession, and establishes himself as 


if iu his native land—he who has no longer a country here below. 


ato) Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


From that lofty station, when his eyes fall upon human things, 
he is able to see at once the beginning and the eud; consequently, 
he measures and judges them. His discourses are instructions 
which master conviction and influence conscience, while by their 
rhythm they take firm root in the memory. They are like a 
preaching addressed to the multitude, an exhorting never silent, 
taking men captive by seizing upon the strongest of their endow- 
ments, intelligence and love. This is then a poetry which, to the 
three harmonies whence beauty results, joins two others, the har- 
mony of the thought with that which is, that is to say, truth; 
and the harmony of the word with that which ought to be, name- 
ly, morality. 

Tt thus possesses a double value, mental and moral, responding 
to the dearest needs of the greatest number of men: it wins the 
comprehension of those whom it has comprehended ; it is a work- 
ing power; it is, as the phrase runs, social. Here again is a 
phenomenon that undeniably merits a place in the history of art. 
It is indeed more than a phenomenon, it is an example, and an 
example, when it is excellent, carries with it the refutation of 
contrary theories. 

The union of two things so rare, a poetic and popular philoso- 
phy and a philosophic and really social poetry, constitutes a mem- 
orable event, indicating one of the highest degrees of power to 


which the human mind has ever attained. If every power, or 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 57 


foree, finds its exciting cause in the circumstances environing it, 
the event just indicated must lead us to appreciate the intellectual 
culture of the epoch in which it is encountered. As we pause 
with respect before the dwelling wherein an illustrious man was 
born, although the walls may be blackened by age and we do not 
comprehend its interior arrangement, so may we also learn to re- 
spect the civilization amid which Dante lived, although it may 
seem to us blurred in the shadow of a far-away time. To do this, 
we shall have to modify some of our historical habits: we may 
even be obliged to throw back by two centuries or more, the 
generally admitted date of the renaissance, which date calumni- 
ously takes for granted the degradation of the ten preceding 
generations. We shall be forced to confess that men already un- 
derstood the art of thinking and of speaking, even while they 
still knew how to believe and to pray. We shall render homage 
to that heroic age, that beautiful adolescence of Christian human- 
ity, toward which, in these days of stormy virility, we often have 
need to turn our eyes. Such tardy confessions are not lacking at 
the present time. Yet, if we may be permitted to attach any 
especial hope to the result of this our own work, it will be the 
hope that such avowals may be multiplied. It has been above all 
a feeling of filial piety which has guided us while collecting the 
facts and ideas to be set forth in this volume: they are for-us a 


few more flowers to be strewn upon the graves of our fathers who 


53 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


were good and great, a few more grains of incense to be offered 
at the altar of Him who made them good and great that His de- 
signs might be wrought out. 

These motives, determining the selection of the philosophic 
point of view occupied by us, will not make us forget the limits 
of the horizon which it embraces. We shall not attempt to take 
in the immense range swept by the vision, nor to follow out all 
the mysterious labyrinths of the Divine Comedy: we know that 
the memories of the past and the seenes of the present, political 
passions and passions of a tenderer kind, national traditions and 
religious beliefs, heaven and earth, all had their share in this 
admirable creation : 

**The poem sacred 
To which both heaven and earth have set their hand.” ! 

We recognize in it portions that are epic, elegiae, didactic, all 
gathered together in a harmonious whole. The didactie portion, 
in its turn, seems to us divisible into two parts: the first, truly 
theological: the second, truly philosophical. But the Divine 
Comedy is like one of those vast inheritanees fallen into the 
hands of a weak and impoverished posterity, who must divide. 
that they may properly till it. We have chosen the portion hitherto 


the least cultivated, but perhaps one of the richest; we cannot 


= A ee = — 


' Paradiso, cant. xxv,, terz. 1. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 59 


begin to clear up the ground unless we first step outside of its 
boundaries, 

Kverything, in fact, ought to be studied in connection with its 
surroundings (dans son milieu). Kyen when we endeavor to iso- 
late some one subject in order the better to master it, we cannot 
entirely withdraw it from the influence of things exterior to it- 
self. In every abstraction, there remains some small degree of 
reality, as in an artificial vacuum there always remains a small 
quantity of air. A philosophical system is not an isolated fact, it 
is the product of all the faculties of the soul: these faculties obey a 
previously-received education, impulsions external to the soul 
itself. It will then be useful to begin by studying the general aspect 
of Dante’s epoch, the phases of contemporary scholastic teaching, 
the especial characteristics of the Italian school to which he 
belonged, the studies and the vicissitudes which filled up his life, 
and the influence which all these causes combined necessarily 
exerted upon his doctrines. 

It was doubtless in the Divine Comedy that the genius of the 
author found expression. But genius ean never be all contained 
within the limits of a single form, let that form be as vast as it 
may; it overflows the boundaries set, and whether by preluding 
its chosen work, or by occasionally interrupting it, it finds other 
channels for the exuberance of its inspirations. Thus the hand 


that traced the Divine Comedy threw off, as if in play, other 


60 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


writings which are a commentary upon it, and its natural comple- 
ment. From a comparison of these several documents, one with 
another, but in the main adhering to the conceptions encoun- 
tered in the poem, we shall endeavor to bring forth a complete 
analysis of the author's philosophy. After sketching the sepa- 
rate features of this philosophy, we shall try to characterize the 
whole taken together. We must transport ourselves into the 
divers orders of ideas, in the centre of which it seems to 
have its place. We will examine by what points it holds to each 
one, how it touches upon reminiscences of the Academy or of the 
Lyceum, on the disputes between the realists and the nominalists, 
on the recent discussions concerning materialism and spirituality. 
Then we will rise with it above systems that pass away; we 
will follow it to the foot of an immutable tribunal, that of Re- 
ligion. Lending ourselves to old controversies recently renewed, 
we shall see whether we are to place the Italian poet amid the 
tumultuous crowd of heterodox minds, or to admit him among 
the noblest disciples of eternal orthodoxy. 

The logical order of these researches presupposes the solution 
of several historic questions, an exhaustive examination of which 
would necessitate long digressions; these questions will form 
the subjects of some supplementary disquisitions ; the book will 
close with a series of extracts from St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, 


Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon, which, containing in small 


In the Thirteenth Century. 61 


compass some principal points of their teaching, may perhaps render 
clearer the doctrine of Dante by showing that of his masters, 
and may aid in making known the CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE 
THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

This goal reached, if we look behind us, we shall not be able 
to conceal from ourselves the insufficiency of our efforts. The 
Divine Comedy is in some sense the composite result of all the 
conceptions of the Middle Ages, each one of which in turn is the 
resultant of a gradual work carried on through the length and 
breadth of the schools, Christian, Arabian, Alexandrian, Tatin, 
Greek, and having its beginning far back in the sanctuaries of the 
Kast. It would be worth while to follow out this long genealogy. 
It would be well worth our while to know how many centuries 
and generations, how many vigils forgotten or unknown, thoughts 
obtained with difficulty, then abandoned, returned to or trans- 
formed, had been required to render such a work possible: what 
it cost, and consequently, what value is to be placed upon it. 
But a study of this kind would never come toan end. If Ber- 
nadin de Saint-Pierre discovered a world of insects on a straw- 
berry vine, and, after twenty days of observation, withdrew con- 
founded before the wonders of one humble plant, is it astonishing 
that one great man, one single book of that great man, a single 
aspect of that book should suffice for the labor of many years ? 


But will the years consumed in such a way leave no regret be- 


62 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


hind them ?....Like to our poet, a pilgrim through the limitless 
regions of history, surrounded by all the figures of the past, we 
are allowed only a short converse with each one of them, under 
penalty of not being able to accost the rest. To us, as to him, it 
seems that a voice cries out: 

** Already is the moon beneath our feet : 


The time permitted now is short; and things 


By thee undreamed of still remain to see,’’ * 


1 Inferno, xxix., 4, 


ALR I. 
CHAPTER I. 
RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND INTELLECTUAL SITUATION OF CHRIS- 
TENDOM FROM THE THIRTEENTH TO THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY ; 


CAUSES FAVORING THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHY. 


PEs , “ 
sy" Providence and human liberty, the two great powers 


a whose combined operation explains history, sometimes 
act in unison that the work of the ages may be prosecut- 
ed with increased vigor, and the face of al] thingsbe renewed. At 
such times, certain unanimous instinets, dwelling in the multitude 
as if manifestations of the willof God (vow Dei), change their di- 
rection. Political institutions, which result from a certain devel- 
opment of the faculties of man, give way under the influence of 
an ulterior movement. Such epochs are known as epochs of tran- 
sition. One of these is met with in the Middle Ages, extending 
from the middle of the thirteenth to somewhat beyona the first 
years of the fourteenth century. 
I. At that period, the Church itself, unchangeable in the ac- 


complishment of its eternal destinies, admitted a certain change 
63 


64 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


in its action upon the temporal affairs of Christendom. If $3 
again, upon two occasions, descended into the arena, if it withstood 
Frederic II., and Philip the Fair in defence of the liberties of all, 
on an other oceasion, in presence of the misfortunes of its head, 
Boniface VITI., it judged that other days had set in. It then be- 
gan to lay aside the political guardianship it had exercised over 
nations still in their infancy, but now become strong enough to 
take upon themselves the defence of their own causes. It slowly re- 
treated within the limits of the spiritual domain. Four cecumeni- 
ical councils, one at the Lateran, two at Lyons, and one at Vienne, 
called together in less that one hundred years, had already extend- 
ed the comprehension of dogmas, had tightened the bonds of dis- 
cipline, and had provided for the reform of morals. Four relig- 
ious orders newly instituted, the Order of St. Dominic and that of 
St. Francis, the Augustinians, and the Fathers of Mercy. multiplied, 
wherever they went, the light of instruction and the works of love. 
The thought of religion hovered less frequently over battlefields, 
and entered less into the councils of princes, but it had succeeded 
in taking a more assured place at family firesides, it penetrated 
more deeply into the solitude of individual consciences; it 
there formed virtues crowned by the aureola of the saints. 
There are few periods which have so abundantly peopled our 
altars. 7s 


On the other hand, the shores of Africa had witnessed the fail- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 65 


ure of two crusades, the last heroie efforts of Christendom to pass 
beyond its European boundaries. The Christian world had been 
foreed to defend its northern frontiers against hordes of Mongo 
lians, and to win its southern bounds back from the Moors. Suat- 
isfied with preserving its independence from the powers without, 
it thenceforth employed its energies within its own borders. ‘To 
the glorious era of conquest, succeeded the laborious era of polit- 
ical organization, The Holy Roman Empire, dishonored by the 
crimes of the Hohenstaufen, lost the homage of its most illustri- 
ous feudatories and its old title to universal supremacy. Escaped 
from the centralization which menaced them, the new nationali- 
ties were in progress of establishment; they were separating, one 
from another, arranging their boundaries, and this not without 
frequent wars, frequent diplomatic experiments, the first rudi- 
ments of international law. The feudal aristocracy ceased to be 
that exclusive power before which many generations had silently 
bowed. It was forced to enter into a struggle, or into a series of 
negotiations with royalty, which was breaking away from it, and 
with the clergy and the people, who both energetically laid claim 
to their respective franchises. Under the names of Estates, of 
Parliaments, of Diets, or of Cortes, representative assemblies ex- 
isted, where the three orders appeared as the moral, military, and 
financial guardians of the nations. But above all did the Third 


Estate, the fruit of the emancipation of the towns, increased by 


66 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the enfranchisement of large numbers of serfs, ingenious in 
maintaining in its ranks that union which is the source of 
strength, and skilful in forming alliances with the older powers, 
gradually enlarge the part allotted to it in public affairs. Local 
and arbitrary customs vielded to the general pathoriey of the or- 
dinances of the princes, to the learned authority of Roman juris- 
prudence. The newly codified laws were executed through the 
ministry of a settled magistracy which admitted plebeians to sit in 
its courts. From that juncture must date the renaissance of the 
civil law. 

Peaceful revolutions were also in progress within the realm of 
thought. Theology still led the sciences, but, without jealousy 
she beheld them grow up aroundher. The travels of Marco Polo, 
the missionary efforts of a few poor friars who crossed the deserts 
of northern Asia, Genoese vessels borne by the winds to the Can- 
ary Islands, had enlarged the limits of the known world. The 
discovery or invention of the compass, of spectacles and of gun- 
powder, led men to divine forces in nature till then unperceived. 
On every hand were opened schools of various sorts, often spe- 
cial in their purpose, as those of Salerno and Montpellier for 
medicine, and that of Pisa for jurisprudence. In the principal divis- 
ions of the Christian world arose universities, real)y worthy of 
the name from the encyclopedic character of their teaching 


and the multitude of students they attracted from the most dis- 


—_—— 


In the Thirteenth Century. 67 


tant lands. Paris set the first example; Oxford, Bologna, Padua, 
Salamanea, Naples, Upsal, Lisbon, and Rome followed it before the 
lapse of a hundred years. The progress of the arts had been still 
more rapid. The day of great inspirations was already past: 
that of analytical labor had begun. To the epics of chivalry and 
the lyries which had been sung, succeeded a poetry friend- 
ly to allegory and to satire, didactic, often pedantic, which, aban- 
doned by music, preserved only rhythm. Prose, in its turn, 
withdrew the written word from the laws of rhythm. to subject it 
solely to the laws of a grammar not yet settled. It made its first 
timid attempts in collections of laws and in chronicles, meanwhile 
fixing the character of modern languages. The arts of design 
followed a similar course. Architecture, after reaching the high- 
est perfection possible to the Gothic style, strove to gain in elab- 
orateness what it perhaps lost in purity. Painting and sculpture, 
sheltered beneath its shadow, subjected to its dispositions, and 
treated until then as simple subordinates, no longer contented 
themselves with giving life to stained windows and peopling the 
niches of basilicas; they ventured upon independent compositions 
in the frescos which began to cover the walls, and in the decor- 
ations of tombs. Finally, commerce, which, under favor of the cru- 
sades, had extended the circle of its maritime enterprises, was 
now busied in exploring overland routes and in multiplying cen- 


tres of trade. Manufacturing industries prospered in the cities. 


68 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


protected by municipal liberties. The transformation of serfdom 
into vassalage encouraged agriculture, as previously the change 
of slavery into serfdom had regenerated it. 

Amid these varying forms of human activity, Philosophy could 
not remain stationary. The noise of the exterior world penetrat- 
ed even into the deepest solitudes, and there deflected the course 
and prolonged the duration of the most serious meditations. 
Generous souls are unwilling to remain on a level lower than that 
of the facts which they witness, and great events call forth 
great ideas. But the movement that was taking place was a move- 
ment of withdrawal and of interior organization, when elements, 
foreign to one another but until then confounded, separated, or 
attracted to themselves homogeneous elements until then di- 
vided. This movement reproducing itself in philosophy, was con- 
verted into reflection, abstraction, recomposition, that is to say, in- 
to the very acts which constitute the science of philosophy. In 
this way did the forces, developed by the age, bear upon that 
science and determine the exercise of its powers. 


II. The men of the day co-operated with the force of circum- 





1 We here speak of the vicissitudes of the arts in the northern countries 
of Europe only. In Italy, other causes had prepared for them an earlier 
and more continuous prosperity. The facts we have just called to mind 
are reflected by many allusions in Dante’s poem, while their consequences 


are evident in his doctrines. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 69 


stances. First in order came the sovereign pontiffs: Innocent IV., 
_whose inflexible courage swayed the thirteenth century, sought 
to reign al-o through the cultivation of intelligence. Forced to 
fly from city to city, and to find shelter beneath foreign roofs, he 
gathered arvund him, as the sole ornament of his exile, a group 
of learned men who formed in themselves an entire university. 
Later, extending his solicitude to all the schools of Christendom, 
he was filled with apprehension at seeing students crowd around 
ihe chairs of jurisprudence and desert those of philosophy. He 
eudevored to re-direet attention to the Jast named study; he 
even attached to it temporal interest by deciding it to be an indis- 
pensable preliminary to the attainment of ecclesiastical honors 
and benefices.1 Urban IV. commanded that at Rome, and under 
his own eye, physics and ethics should be taught by St. Thomas 
Aquinas. Every day, after dinner, he encouraged among his car- 
dinals philosophical discussions, in which he himself took part. 
This honorable familiarity consoled science, and made it forget 
the haughty contempt bestowed upon it by gilded puppets and 
ignorant, mail-clad men.? On the papal throne and in the person 


of Clement 1V., Roger Bacon found the sole protector of his much 





1 Tiraboschi, t. IV., lib. I., cap. II. Duboulay, Histoire de Vv Universite, 
ann, 1254, 
2 Tiraboschi, t. 1V:, lib. TI., cap. II. Letter from Campano de Novara to 


Pope Urban IV. 


70 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


calumniated labors. Other popes were the possessors, not only of 
friendly dispositions, but of personal learning and ajustly acquired 
renown: such were Peter of Tarentasia, orator, canonist, and 
metaphysician, who took the name of Innocent V.; and Jolin 
XXI., better known as Peter the Spaniard, who was the author of 
a logic received with unanimous approbation and long regarded as 
a classic work.’ 

Among secular princes, several followed these examples. First 
in rank came Frederic II., emperor of Germany, the wearer of four 
crowns, whose reign was a long forty years’ war, and who ap- 
peared by turns as legislator and as tyrant—a conquering barbar- 
ian under his tents in Lombardy, a voluptuous sultan in his se- 
raglios of Apulia and Sicily, a troubadour by inclination,:and a 
philosopher, perhaps, through cstentation. During the hours of 
leisure passed in his well filled library, Greek or Arabic manu- 
scripts were often unrolled by him; he wished to make them 
known in Europe, and, in a manifesto drawn up by his chancellor. 
Pietro delle Vigne, he announced the translation of a number 
of works, including probably some of the writings of Aristotle.* 


Learning met with no less favor under King Robert of Naples. 





1 Brucker, Hist. critic. philos., Vol. I11., period II., part I1., bk. IT., chap. 
iii., sect. 2.—Dante, Paradiso, cant. xii., terz. 44. 
2 Brucker, Hist.critic. philos., chup. iii., sect. 1—Jourdain, Recher- 


ches gur les traductions @ Aristote, 2d edition. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. Al 


lauded after his death as a consummate sage’; under Alphonso 
of Castile, who merited the title of the Wise, and even at the 
English court, where an adulatory crowd gathered to listen to the 
lessons of Duns Scotus.? But in no country better than in France 
did royalty know how to reflect honor upon itself by the influ- 
euce which it exerted on the cultivation of the human under- 
standing. The tale would be a long one to tell:—St. Thomas 
Aquinas invited ta the table of St. Louis, and the king making 
his secretaries write down the sudden inspirations of the Angelic 
Doctor; Vincent of Beauvais admitted, in virtue of his position as 
reader, to the intimacy of the same prince ; the Sorbonne founded; 
Philip the Bold naming as instructor to his son the famous Kgidi- 
us Colonna.? It suffices to call to mind that the benefactions of 
the French kings made the prosperity of the University of Paris. 
They gave to it that prestige which attracted to its benches forty 
thousand students of every nationality, called to its chairs the 
most illustrious foreigners, and rendered it worthy of being sa- 
luted by the popes as the fountain of truth, the centre of illumi- 
nation. So that, placing ourselves in the thirteenth century on 


the modest hill of St. Genevieve, we may see gathering as tributaries 


1 Tiraboschi, t. V., lib. I., cap. IJ. He quotes Petrarch and Boceaccio. 
2 Brucker, Hist. critic. philos., chap. iii., sect. 2. 
3 Brucker, loc. cit., Michelet, Histoire de France, Vols. I. and III. 


4 Bull of Alexander IV., cited by Raynaldus. 


72 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


at its foot, all the intellectual glories of the Catholic world; we 
may hear discussed the innumerable questions raised in contro- 
versy; we may descry from afar the evolutions of struggling 
minds: in short, from that view-point we may overlook the entire 
course of contemporary philosophy. 

The spiritual power and the temporal, so often armed one 
against the other, were then in agreemert regarding their action 
upon the labors of thought. Both assured to conscientious study 
security, liberty, and leisure. Both, above all, by conferring up- 
on instruction public consecration, imposed on it the abnegation 
of all personal rivalries, and formed it to grave and conciliatory 
habits. 

III. One of the most prominent consequences of the protection 
of learning by the great, was the rapid multiplication of books and 
translations, and hence the daily increasing accessibility of the 
learning of antiquity and the doctrines of the East. The latest 
writers escaping the ruin of Rome, together with the Organum of 
Aristotle and the treatises of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, were 
the introductory teachers of the first scholastics.1 Later, the 
crusades had familiarized the Latins with the languages of Greece 


and of the Orient. The works of St. John Damascen were trans- 








1 On the history of the Organum in the Middle Ages, see the Memoire 
de M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Vol. II: See also Brucker, Zoc. cit. lib. 
I1., cap. I. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 73 


lated, and William, abbot of St. Denis, brought back with him 
from Constantinople sundry manuscripts, among which might 
have been found the Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics of Aristo- 
tle.’ Already had daring pilgrims gone to the schools of Toledo 
and Cordova in search of Mussulman learning. But it was espec- 
ially toward the period now occupying us that Hellenism and 
Orientalism intervened, with an unexpected display of strength, 
in the philosophical destinies ef the West. The diversity of 
idioms was no longer an obstacle for an age which had witnessed 
the conquest of the Byzantine empire and the invasion of Egypt by 
the armies of France: the works of Avicenna and of Averroes ap- 
peared in the Latin tongue; Moses Maimonides made known the 
works of Mussulman doctors as well as the reveries of the Jewish 
Kabbala ; at the same time, Ptolemy’s Almayesta, Plato’s Timaeus, 
the books of Proclus, and others less renowned, found interpreters. 
But great above all was the good fortune of Aristotle; his works. 
already translated from Arabie versions, were retranslated from 
the original text. Some treatises passed even into the popular 


idioms. The opposition, at first so threatening, of the University 








1 The marriage of Otho II. to Theophania must have conduced to the re- 
establishment of intercourse between the West and Greece. M. Barthél- 
emy Saint-Hilaire has proved tbe continuity of Greek studies through the 
Middle Ages. Jourdain, Recherches sur les traductions d’ Aristote, 2d 


edition. 


74 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


of Paris, which had obtained in a provincial council the condemna- 
tion of the peripatetic doctrines, had been moderated by the wis- 
dom of Pope Gregory IX. ; this opposition soon began to admit ex- 
ceptions; it then inclined toward a general toleration, and ended 
by dying out under the influence of the most venerated doctors, 
who, covering the Stagyrite with their mantle, conducted him, 
not merely to the threshold, but even to the very centre of the 
School. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, classic An- 
tiquity and the East received a sort of solemn welcome into the 
Christian Republic, when, at the council of Vienne, it was or- 
dained to establish in the four principal universities and in the 
place where the Roman court should have its residence, chairs of 
Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, and Greek. This authority conceded 
to the Ancients and the Arabs, was not arbitrary in its principle : 
it was due to a long series of hard working men, not without an 
occasional sublime inspiration, who represented the learned tra- 
dition of the human race. If this tradition cannot be accepted 
without examination, neither can it be neglected without impru- 
dence. The secret of allreally scientific progress lies in an econ- 


omy wisely careful of the experience of the past as applicable to the 





1 Lannoi, de Varid Aristotelis fortund. Jourdain, Recherches, ch. V. 
2 Tiraboschi, t. V. lib. I1I., cap. 1V.—John of Salisbury, Robert Grosse- 
Téte, Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, and even Heloise, appear to bave 


known Greek and Hebrew. See Brucker, loc. cit. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 75 


needs of tie future. Woe indeed to isolated generations, which, 
not having received the heritage of instruction or having repudi- 
ated it, are obliged to begin afresh, frail and mortal as they are, 
the work of the ages ! 

Thus, while contemporary events communicated to philosophy 
an enduring movement, and the good will of men in power gave it 
a direction, the appearance of antique and foreign doctrines marked 


for it its point of departure. 


CHAPTERIL 
SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 
IG 


HEN the barbarian invaded Europe, trampling under 


4) 


( 


AN \ 


t 


: foot the long cultured furrows of Latin civilization, the 


o~ 


small amount of learning scattered here and there that still re- 
mained after the great catastrophe, was gathered together by pious 
hands, closely grasped that the loss might not be total, and enclosed 
within a narrow circle, a meagre encyelopeedia, which reduced the 
liberal arts to the number of seven, divided into triviwm and qua- 
drvivium.! Philosophy was included in this eycle only by the 
least of its parts, dialectics: theology found in it no place; the 
science of divine things remained secluded in the depths of the 
sanctuary, apparently inactive in certain directions. 

But brighter days were at hand. Within the depths of the 
sanctuary, amid the inspiring ceremonial of divine worship and 
the reverberation of the preacher’s voice, Theology had roused 


herself; she sought to form a conception of the invisible things 





1 This division of the branches of learning, probably derived from a 
Pythagorean source, is found in Philo, de Congressu, in Tzetzes Chil., IX, 
877, It was introduced into the West by the writings of Cassiodorus and 


Martianus Capella. 
76 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 77 


which she proposed for belief; this was the beginning of the met- 
aphysical studies of the period. Thenceforth, dialectics could no 
longer be confined within the limits of the triviwm. Weary of 
combining words, it attempted to bind together the conceptions 
which had been elicited, and thus rose to the function of logic. 
Metaphysics and logic found themselves face to face, and a dog- 
matic philosophy resulted from their union. The conditions of this 
union depended upon a primary problem, namely, whether there 
is a correspondence between the invisible existences postulated 
by metaphysics and the notions deduced by logice—between reali- 
ties and ideas. This was the famous problem of wniver'sals, be- 
queathed by antiquity (in a phrase contaired in the writings of 
the Alexandrian, Porphyry) to the Middle Ages, which accepted 
the inheritance. St. Anselm resolved it by concluding the exis- 
tence of God from the notion of God, by establishing the necessary 
reality ‘of the idea of perfection, by realizing all general ideas, thus 
making himself the head of the Realists. 

Others, on the contrary with Roscelin, refused all objective 
value to general ideas, and recognized in genus and species merely 
arbitrary creations of language: these were the Noménalists. The 
two rival schools renewed the interminable struggle between ideal- 
ism and sensism. They had illustrious champions, as William of 
Champeaux and Abelard, who filled Christendom with the din of 


their mutual onslaughts. The discussion multiplied the divisions: 


78 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


there were four sects of Realists, and the Nominalists numbered 
three.* 

These contradictory conclusions of human reason seemed to de- 
clare its inefficiency. Some rejected the uncertain aid of logic 
and thought to rise to knowledge by intuition, to intuition by 
means of asceticism. There was then a mystic philosophy, whose 
principles were formulated by the writings of Godfrey, Hugh, and 
Richard, all monks of the abbey of St. Victor.2 Theology, when 
awaking rational studies from slumber, called them out upon the 
border lines between orthodoxy and human opinion. These boun- 
daries, often difficult to determine, were frequently not properly 
recognized. Certain doctrines aroused suspicion ; others, as those 
of Amaury of Chartres and David of Dinant, called forth solemn 
anathemas. From the violent collision between scientific liberty 
and religious authority, arose doubt. Confused memories of pagan 


literature, and the first influence of Saracen doctors, encouraged 


1 The dispute between the Realists and the Nominalists, previously set 
forth by Brucker, Chap. III, Sect. 3; by Degerando, Vol. IV; Biihle, and 
Thenemann; has been ably analyzed in the preface to the edition of the 
works of Abelard, issued by M. Cousin. John of Salisbury, in his Meta- 
logicus cited by Brucker, ‘bid. enumerates six different opinions as divid- 


ing Realism. 


2 Cousin, Course of History of Philosophy, Vol. I. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 79 


scepticism.’ Thus, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, 
all the tendencies of the human mind had shown themselves, and 
their very divergence testified to their energy. 

II. This century, already glorious under so many titles, was al- 
so that in which scholastic philosophy reached its apogee. The 
abdication of power which the Church was about to make in the 
political order, had already been preluded by Theology in the intel- 
lectual order. Theology emancipated philosophy, which, under her 
tuition, had acquired strength enough tostandalone. She retained 
only her maternal superiority and the relations of reciprocal assist- 
ance: there was a certain separation, but neither in all things nor 
for ever: emancipation, but no mutual disavowal. “ The science 
of Faith,” said the doctors, “considers created things only in as 
much as they reflect an imperfect image of the Divinity: human 
philosophy considers them in the modes of being which are prop- 
er to themselves. The philosopher proposes to himself the inves- 
tigation of secondary and special causes; the believer meditates 
on the First Cause. In philosophical teaching, we start from the 
knowledge of creatures to reach the idea of God, who is the end: 
in the teaching of Faith, we begin by the idea of God, and, dis- 


covering in Him the universal order, of which He is the centre. 





1 Cousin, loc. cit. Brucker, Chap. III. Sect. 1. Précis de Vhist. de la 


philosophie, issued by the directors of the College de Juilly, p. 275. 


80 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


we come to the knowledge of creatures. This second method is 
the more perfect, since it assimilates human intelligence to the 
Divine Intelligence, which, in contemplating Itself, contemplates 
all things in Itself. And yet the science of theologians may bor- 
row somewhat from the labor of philosophers, not that such labor 
is necessary to it, but to lend more clearness to the dogmas which 
it presents to our belief.” ? 

Thenceforth assured of a distinct existence, and one certainly not 
without honor, philosophy developed freely, and we may see the 
wide limits she assigned to herself when defining her own posi- 
tion: ‘Philosophy is the study of intelligible truths; and, as 
these truths relate to words, to things, or to morals, it is rational, 
natural, or moral. Rational, it embraces grammar, which has for 
its object the expression of ideas; logic, which is concerned in 
their transmission ; and rhetoric, which aims at producing emo- 
tions. Natural, it comprises physics, which treats of the genera- 
tion and corruption of things; mathematics, by which we consid- 
er abstract forms and general laws; metaphysics, by which we 
lead things back to their cause, their type, their end. Moral, it 
bears the divers names of monastics, economies, or polities, accord- 
ing as it aims at procuring the good of the individual, of the family, 


or of the state.” 2 

1 St. Thomas, Summa contra gentes, lib. I1, cap. IV. Summa Theologiae, 
Dose Wart. 1V. 

2 St. Bonaventura, de Reductioneartiumad Theologiam. Idem, Brev- 
iloquinm: “* Philosophia est medium per quod theologus fabricat sibi spec- 
ulum ex ¢reaturis ex quibus tanquam per scalam erigitur‘in coelum.” 





Ln the Thirteenth Century. 81 


This enumeration gave to philosophy the position of a universal 
science, such as the ancients conceived it when they embraced 
within its limits eloquence and poetry, geometry and leyvislation, 
and when they named it, the knowledge of things human and 
divine.’ If, besides, we eliminate grammar, rhetoric, and math- 
ematics, which, already contained in the seven arts, had their own 
special teaching, there remained logic, physics, metaphysics, and 
morals, which, all taken together, constituted the course of phil- 
osophy of the School, embracing a comprehensive system of doc- 
trines, questions asked and answers given in regard to God, na- 
ture, and humanity, thus forming the necessary completion of the 
previous studies. But, since in this course, logic occupied the 
first place, and a close examination of intellectual phenomena was 
made before permission was given to devote oneself to the explor- 
ation of the outer world, it was first in ideas that one studied 
things, truths of all kinds appeared primarily in the light of con- 
sciousness ; from that time, although as yet without receiving any 
name, existed psychology, on which branch were to be concen- 
trated the philosophical researches of the moderns. So that all 
the definitions which have been given of philosophy at every peri- 
od of its existence, the broadest as well as the deepest, are ap- 
plicable to the scholastic philosophy. 


1 Cicero, Tuscul., lib. v. de Officiis, II. 


82 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


To act in the new sphere opened to it, philosophy required a 
union of all its powers. It needed an organization capable of di- 
recting the widely scattered efforts of thought to an efficient eo- 
operation. We have already mentioned the political causes fa- 
voring the convergence of the existing variety of systems. Among 
the numerous shades of realism and nominalism, there were some 
Which nearly approached one another. Thus, the opinion of Gil- 
bert de Ja Porée, who admitted generality only in the laws of na- 
ture, seemed readily to blend with that of John of Salisbury, who 
allowed the legitimacy of general ideas formed by the abstraction 
of the qualities common to many individuals.? 

This fusion was actually effected. And while, dating from 
about the year 1200, all Christian thinkers took with pride the 
name of realists, conceptualism, an outcome of nominalism, had 
penetrated to the depths of their teaching. Thus were reconciled 
the two schools which had divided the area of dogmatism by ad- 
hering without reserve either to the experience of the senses or 
to the infallibility of reason. They also learned to appreciate the 
importance of mysticism, and borrowed from it those intuitive 
perceptions of which it alone possesses the secret. At the same 
time, the temptations to scepticism called into being by an imper- 
fect and consequently dangerous knowledge of pagan and mus- 


sulman doctrines, disappeared before a complete erudition, which 








1 Brucker, Chap. ITI., Sect. 3. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 83 


filled the part of a wise and cautious moderator. The final result 
was a veritable eclecticism, whereby an alliance was concluded 
embracing reason, the senses, intuition, the tradition of the past, 
each and all of the great powers of the understanding. In lieu of 
the exclusive sects of the preceding period, arose illustrious doc- 
tors, each one representing more especially one or another of 
the said powers, but not thence failing to recognize the others. 

III. Alain de Lille, Alexander Hales, Vincent of Beauvais, and 
William of Auvergne, were merely precursors. 

Finally appeared Albert the Great (1195-1280), an Atlas who 
bore on his head the entire round of the learning of his day, and 
who no whit bent beneath its weight: familiar with the languages 
of antiquity and of the East. he drew from those two sources of 
tradition powers really gigantic. From the benches of the Uni- 
versity of Paris, where he had sat asa simple learner, he passed 
to Cologne, where, establishing his chair, he appeared as the ini- 
tiating hierophant of Germany. His chief merit lies in the ex- 
tentand the profusion of his erudition. However, he did not neg- 
lect pyschological questions, which can be solved only by the per- 
sonal exercise of reason: he pronounced upon the origin and the 
value of ideas, and on the division of the faculties of the soul. 
He did not disdain to interrogate nature, and to seek in persever- 
ing observation, in furnaces. and erucibles, unknown powers, such 


as the transmutation of metals. He went still farther. in regions 


84 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


inaccessible to human vision, impenetrable to induction, he thought 
to discover supernatural agents capable of modifying the regular 
order of phenomena: it is said that he himseif believed in the title 
of magician conferred on him by his disciples. He continued 
popular in the memory of posterity, as a being almost mythologi- 
cal and more than human.' 

In another quarter, in a cell of an obscure English convent, the 
inspiration which gives rise to great discoveries descended on a 
poor friar, Roger Bacon (1214-1294). He had studied at Oxford 
and at Paris, but the imperfections in the studies of his time had 
struck him at an early period: he sought out the causes, demon- 
strated the need of reform, proposed its conditions, and himself 
set the example. He held especially to the value of experience, 
an enlightened, thoughtful experience, which, not content with 
mercly investigating phenomena, calls them forth, and reproduces 
them by way of experiment. Amid the sombre shadows of his 
laboratory, this unknown man had a vision of the future. He 
says: ‘ One may cause to burst forth from bronze thunderbolts 
more formidable than those produced by nature: a small quantity 
of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by 


a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so far as to 





1 Cousin, Course of History of Philosophy, vol. I.—Albert, Summa de 


Creaturis, de Anima, lib. 1. tract. 2. Libellus de Alchimia.—Dante, Par- 


adiso, x., 34. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 85 


destroy a city or anarmy. Art can construct instruments of nav- 
igation such that the largest vessels, governed by a single man, 
will traverse rivers aud seas more rapidly than if they were filled 
with oarsmen. One may also make carriages, which, without the 
aid of any animal, will run with immeasurable swiftness.” ’ 
Roger Bacen, however, could tear himself away from such at- 
tractive investigations and visit other portions of the domain of 
philosophy. He solved in an eclectic sense the question of univer- 
sals. In addition to external experience and the conceptions of 
reason, he admitted an interior experience which is acquired in the 
communion of the soul with God. Healso accepted the authority 
of the wisdom of the antique world, but not until it had been test- 
ed by severe criticism: philology was to him the object of many 
and prolonged meditations. Providence conferred upon him length 
of days, and science awaited from him a whole century of prog- 
ress; but the wonder of his contemporaries, who named him the 
Admirable (Doctor mirabilis), was changed to odious suspicion. 
His old age was passed in a prison, and light was lacking to his 


latest labors. In after years, at the era of the ‘‘ Reformation,” 





1 Roger Bacon, de Secretis Artis et Nature. Gunpowder appears to 
have been employed a hundred years before his time by the Moors in Spain. 
But Bacon was doubtless one of the earliest among the learned men of 
Europe to make known its wonderful effects. Neither can we with perfect 


certainty credit him with the invention of the telescope. 


86 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


his manuscripts were destroyed in the burning of a convent by 
men who professed to be relighting the torch of reason extin- 
guished by the monks of the Middle Ages.’ 

About the same period, under a less severe sky, at the foot of 
the hills of Tuscany and Calabria (whose slopes have given birth 
to so many great men), two brother geniuses were born: nearly of 
the same age, the same day found them brought together in Paris 
to receive academic honors; a mutual friendship united them dur- 
ing their lives, the same year saw them descend into the tomb, 
and a like veneration placed them both upon our altars. In his- 
tory, we cannot disjoin St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas, 

St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), endowed with an intelligence 
perhaps less laborious and more loving than that of his illustrious 
contemporary, inclined to the doctrines of the contemplatives, 
and strove to harmonize with them the legitimate exercise of all 
the faculties of man. ‘From God,” according to him, “all light 
descends; but this light is multiform in its mode of communica- 
tion. The exterior light, or tradition, illumines the mechanical 
arts; the inferior light, which is that of the senses, gives rise in 
us to experimental ideas; the interior light, which we call rea- 
son, makes us know intelligible truths; the superior light comes 
from Grace and from the Holy Scriptures, and it reveals to us 
the truths which sanctify. These divers orders of knowledge are 


) Précis de Vhistoire de la philosophie. p. 298, 








In the Thirteenth Century. 87 


co-ordinated among themselves, and form an ascending progres- 
sion. The soul, after having descended to the study of external 
objects, ought to retire within itself, where it will discover the 
reflex of the eternal realities; then it must rise into the region 
of eternal realities that it may contemplate the first principle, 
God. From this first principle it will see emanating influences 
which are felt through all the degrees of creation ; redescending, 
as it had ascended, it will recognize traces of the Divine operation 
in everything that is conceived, felt, and taught. Thus all the 
sciences are interpenetrated with mysteries, and it is only by 
grasping the clue to the mystery that we can reach to the pro- 
“foundest depth of the science.” Unfortunately for his disciples, 
the Seraphic Doctor (Doctor Seraphicus) ascended. too speedily, 
and by too short a way, to the mystic heights which he had 
pointed out from below: he died during the sitting of the second 
council of Lyons. The assembled delegates of the universal 
Church honored his obsequies. And if to his memory was still 
due another kind of homage, less imposing and much later in 
time, it was found in the fact that a hundred and fifiy years after 
his death his writings consoled the pious Gerson in the solitude 
to which he had retired, wearied with the sight of a corrupt society 


and the disputes-of a degenerate school.’ 





1 Précis de Vhist. de la philos. St. Bonay., de Reductione artium 


ad Theologiam.—Gerson, apud Brucker, loc. cit.—Dante, Paradiso, xii. 


88 Danie, and Catholic Philosophy 


St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) had heard his master, Albert, 
define the human mind asa “ potential all.” We may say that 
he himself was this al/ realized. Never were more excellent 
qualities more happily combined, while the whole was governed 
by a lofty, serious, meditative reason. Hence, when his compan- 
ions in study called him the great Sicilian Ox, his teachers ac- 
cepted the augury for him. The ordinary abode of his thoughts 
was to be the most rational of all sciences, that consequently 
which rules and co-ordinates all the others, namely : metaphysics. ! 
There, at the end of every speculation, the inevitable problem of 
universals presented itself; it became necessary to pronounce on 
the objective reality of rational conceptions, to establish the equa- 
tion between ideas and things St. Thomas admits in God the 
existence of ideas archetypes of creation; but man has no direct 
vision of these archetypes. His knowledge is formed of the im- 
ages received by the senses, and the abstract perceptions which 
arise from them when viewed in the light of reason. 2 This con- 
ciliatory logic, which conceded a proper place to the intervention 
of the senses, was to lead St. Thomas in his physical researches. 
He refuted the opinion which excluded bodies from the primitive 


plan of creation ; he gave them a place in the hierarchy of beings, 








1 St. Thomas, Prolog. ad Metaphysic. 





2 Summa Theologia, p. i., q. xv. art., 13.—Opuscul. de Sensu respectu 


particularium et Intellectu respectu universalium. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 89 


and discovered in them a concurrence in the universa order, a 
ceaseless tendency to perfection, a foot-print of the Divinity. 
However, his speculative investigations brought him back to 
practicai matters: he established the existence of a series of laws 
binding together in the net-work of their precepts, man, the fam- 
ily, and society ; he also recognized the excellence of contempla- 
tion; he knew the paths by which transcendent virtue may lead 
to the immediate vision of eternal truth.! 

But it was not enough for him to have proved his ability in so 
many different departments; he applied himself to the examina- 
tion of the teaching of his predecessors: various writings of 
Aristotle, the Timaeus of Plato, the Master of the Sentences, were 
all in turn objects of his conscientious commentaries. Finally, St. 
Thomas conceived a work worthy of him, a vast encyclopedia of 
the moral sciences, in which should be set down all that we can 
know of God, of man, and of their mutual relations, a philosophy 
truly Catholic, Summa totius theologie. That monument, so har- 
monious in spite of the apparent asperity of its form, colossal in 
its dimensions, magnificent in its plan, remained indeed unfinished, 
similar in this respect to so many of the great political, literary, 


and architectural creations of the Middle Ages, things which des- 





= — EEE ~ — 


1 Cousin, Course of History of Philosophy, vol. I.—Erasmus, Leibnitz, 
Fontenelle, minds so different, and so little capable of being compared to- 


gether, all agree in lauding St. Thomas.—Dante, Paradiso, x.-xiii. 


go Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tiny has merely shown to us and has uot permitted to reach their 
full accomplishment. .. 
,.-Ostendent Fata, nee ultra 
Hsse sinent 

A prolonged ery of admiration followed the Angel of the 
school (Doctor Angelicus), recalled to heaven. 

Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thom- 
as Aquinas, form among themselves, so to speak, a complete rep- 
resentation of all the intellectual powers: they are the four doe- 
tors who uphold the chair of philosophy in the temple of the 
Middle Ages. Their mission was. truly the re-establishment of 
the sciences, but not their final consummation. They were not 
exempt from the ignorances and erroneous opinions of their day, 
for Providence permits the errors of genius, lest men should be- 
lieve that nothing further remains for them to do. Often, the 
majesty, I may even say the grace of their conceptions, disap- 
pears under the veil of the expressions in which they are clothed; 
but these imperfections are amply atoned for by superabundant 
merits. Those Christian philosophers did not admit within them- 
selves the divorce, since their day become so frequent, between 
the intellect and the will; their lives were uniformly a laborious 
application of their doctrines. They realized in its plenitude the 
practical wisdom so often dreamed of by the ancients—the absti- 


nence of the disciples cf Pythagoras, the constancy of the stoies, 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. . gl 


together with humility and charity, virtues unknown to the an- 
tique worid. Albert the Great and St. Thomas left the castles of 
their noble ancestors to seek obscurity in the cloisters of St. 
Dominic: the former abdicated, and the latter declined, the hon- 
ors of the Church. It was with the cord of St. Francis that 
Roger Bacon and St. Bonaventura girded their loins; when the 
last named was sought that the Roman purple might be placed 
upon his shoulders, he begged the envoys to wait, and he finished 
washing the dishes of the convent. Thus they did not withdraw 
themselves within the exclusive mysteries of an esoteric teaching ; 
they opened the doors of their schools to the sons of shepherds 
and artisans, and, like their Master, Christ, they said: ‘‘ Come 
all!” After having broken the bread of the word, they were 
seen distributing the bread of alms The poor knew them and 
blessed their names. Even yet, after the lapse of six hundred 
years, the dwellers in Paris kneel round the altar of the Angel of 
the School, and the workmen of Lyons deem it an honor once a 
year to bear upon their brawny shoulders the triumphant remains 
of the Seraphie Doctor. 

IV. Scholasticism, however, had not continued without re- 
proach. In those belligerent days, many, whose profession for- 
bade them to break lances and cross swords, earried the ardor of 
battle into the tourneys of speech. Controversy became the pas- 


sion of their lives: they might be seen, shrivelled old men, still 


92 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


standing in the highways, discussing each syllable, each letter, of 
a discourse or an essay.! They spread out arguments like nets, 
they set syllogisms as ambushes, they multiplied combinations of 
words as nature multiplies combinations of things, and, thanks to 
innumerable distinctions, they proved and disproved in turn the 
truth, the falsity, and the uncertainty, of one and the same prop- 
osition.? But as the insurgent crowd described by the poet, 
when it beheld a person illustrious through his services and his 
virtues, calmed down and listened to the words of peace addressed 
to it, so did this disputatious throng of scholars, young and old, 
seem suddenly to forget its eagerness and its animosities when 
the great masters of thought appeared in its midst: wonder im- 
posed silence. But the disorder began again when they had 
passed away. Another generation arose, and, to men of genius, 
succeeded men of talent. 

Raymond Lully (1244-1315), Duns Scotus (1275-1308), and 
Ockham (died in 1345), opened the era of decadence. On one 
hand, Raymond flattered the dangerous tendencies of the dialec- 
ticians of his day by offering to them in his combinatory art a 


mechanical game, whereby could be deduced, without effort and 








! Salisbury, Metalogicus, lib. I., cap. VU. 
2 Walter of St. Victor, apud Brucker. Hugh of St. Victor, Hruditiones 
didascalice, lib. I., XIX. Richara of St. Victor, de Gratia contempla- 


tionis, lib, IT., IL. 


In the Thirteenth Century. — . 93 


without delay, all the consequences of a given principle. On the 
other hand, this doctor, born under the sky of Majorca and in the 
neighborhood of the Mussulman domination, had made extended 
journeys along the coasts of Africa and to the Levant, and had 
been inflamed by the full glow of Arabian and Alexandrian mys- 
ticism: he emitted the perilous rays amid the eager crowd which 
his adventurous life gathered about him. The Celt, Duns Scotus, 
calmer perhaps, but not less desirous of throwing back into a 
problematic condition, the doctrines of his predecessors, denied 
the possibility of obtaining certitude in knowledge acquired 
through the senses. Genus and species appeared to him to be 
primordial realities: he peopled science with creatures of reason 
arbitrarily conceived, and, renewing the opinions of the ancient 
realists, he promulgated the most audacious idealism. Ockham, 
who passed his days in a series of disputes, religious, political, 
and literary, at Oxford in his youth, at Paris under Philip the 
Fair, in Germany with Louis of Bavaria, the veritable knight- 
errant of controversy, took up the glove in the name of the 1om- 
inalists. From the axiom that beings ought not to be multiplied 
without necessity, he was led not only to reject as phantoms the 
creatures of reason, but to fail to recognize the objective value of 
the idea of substance, to hesitate before the distinction between 
spirit and matter, that is, to the extreme limits of sensism. These 


very hesitations indicate the approach of scepticism, which was 


94 _ Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


about to re-appear, and which nothing so favors as the bolduess of 
dogmatic systems that one can neither believe in nor reply to. 
Thus did the exclusive schools re-issue from their own ruins. 
They filled the fourteenth century with their rivalries. Logic, 
that system of learned gymnastics in the practice of which the 
European mind had acquired its vigorous temper, degenerated 
into a skirmish of sophisms, a puerile and dangerous game: ques- 
tious infinitesimally divided rose like dust under the feet of the 
combatants." Metaphysics lost itself in an unfruitful ontology, 
where the Formalities, the Haecceities, and other capricious crea- 
tions of the human mind occupied the place properly belonging to 
the living creations of God.? Experience was no longer inter- 
rogated ; her replies were too slowly obtained and too little pliant 
to the will of the belligerents ; oracles more easily corrupted were 
looked for in the teachings of antiqaity, which were pronounced 
infallible. Then, amid the almost unanimous concert of Christian 
teachers, was celebrated the apotheosis of Aristotle. The pagan 
divinity was not always satisfied with incense; it required sacri- 
fices, the immolation of every independent doctrine.? Scholasti- 


cism ended amid these orgies, like to the king of Israel, whose 





1 Bacon, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum. 
2 L. Vives, apud Brucker. 


> Petrarch, quoted by Tiraboschi, vol. ¥. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 95 


youthful wisdom had astonished the world, and who profaned 
his later days in the temples of foreign idols. 

V. It was about the middle of the period just described, near 
to the year 1300, between the apogee and the beginning of the 
decadence, during one of those solemn moments when even pros- 
perity has something melancholy about it, because it feels its end 
approaching ;—it was at that hour of the swan-song that the 
philosophy of the Middle Ages was to have its poet. For, while 
prose, especially the prose of a dead language, as was that of the 
School, when put to the proof of years, speedily corrupts, and no 
longer allows the idea enclosed in it to appear free from disfigure- 
ment, poetry is like a glorified body, within which the thought 
may remain incorrupt and recognizable. It is also a subtile form 
which penetrates everywhere, and can render itself present in the 
same moment at the most distant points. Immortality and pop- 
ularity are the two divine gifts of which poets have been made the 
dispensers. ‘he Greek philosophy had its Homer in the person of 
Plato; scholasticism, less happily endowed in some respects. and 
menaced with a more speedy decline, experienced toa still greate: 
degree the need of a similar consolation. The poet who was to 
come had then his place marked in time; we mist look for the 
causes which allotted to him his place in space; his period 
known, we have still to make apprehended the intellectual eondi- 


tion of his country. 


CHAPTER HE 


ESPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF 'TALIAN PHILOSOPHY, 


a HREE inseparable things, the True, the Good, and the Bzatr 
hp liful, appeal to the soul of man, both through his feeling 
of their actual absence, and through his hope oftheir possibie 
attainment. The desire for the Good was the first concern of the 
first wise men, and philosophy in its origin as its name imports 
(@chocvgia), was the work of love.’ But, as the Good, to be 
accomplished, must first be perceived as the True, uncertainty in 
practice called for the aid of speculation: it was necessary te 
study beings in crder to determine the laws which link them te- 
gether. One could not approach the True without being struck 
by its splendor, which is the Beautiful; the harmony of beings, 
reflected in the conceptions of the learned, was naturally repi- 
duced even in their discourses. The philosophy of the earner 
titi“: was, then, moral in its direction and poetic in its form. 
Such, as the product of the Pythagorean school, did it first a:- 
pear ia Italy. Soon, cities asked from it laws for their guidance 
and later, the metaphysicians of Elea and Empedocles of Agri- 


1 The <2 ti \ word studium also has two senses, the one intellectual, and 
cre other mora,. 








96 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 97 


gentum sang tie mysteries of nature in the language of the gods. 
Then Rome arose, and, as its name imported (Pdyy), Rome was 
strength; that strength, put into action, became the en, ire of 
the world. The Roman people were then pre-eminently endowed 
with the genius of action. However, the feeling for art was not 
lacking to them: they required harmonious words in their rostrum 
and canticles for their triumphs. When they accepted philosophy, 
she was presented to them under the auspices of Scipio and En- 
nius, and thus found herself pledged to serve and to please’; in 
after days she never ceased to avail herself of the patronage of 
statesmen and of poets. She visited the retreat of Cicero, accom- 
panied Seneca into exile, died with Thrasea, dictated to Tacitus, 
reigned with Marcus Aurelius, and sat in the school of the juris- 
consults who referred the entire science of things divine and hn- 
man to the determination of good and evil.2. She had invited to 
her lessons Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan.? The 
systems of Zeno and of Epicurus readily resolvable into mora 
consequences, and the traditions of Pythagoras bearing the im- 


press of ineffaceable beauty, alone obtained the right of citizen. 





1 Polybius, Exempl. Virt. et Vit. cap. LXXIII.—Pers., Sat., VI. 10. 
2 Lib. I., Digest., de Justitid et Jure. *‘ Veram philosophiam, nee 





simulatam adfectantes.”’ 
3 Virg., Aen., 1. and VI.-~Horat., lib. II. Ep.,2; lib 3 Ep., 4.—Ovta, 
Metam., lib, XV.— Lucan, Pharsal.. Yb. f., 10. 11. 


98 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ship in Rome. Christianity came again to fecundate the soil of 
Italy, which so many illustrious travails seemed necessarily to 
have exhausted. After Pantaenus, the Sicilian bee and the 
founder of the Christian school of Alexandria; after Lactantius 
and St. Ambrose, the genius of the old Romans revived in the 
sixth and seventh centuries in two of theirmost noble descendants, 
Boethius and St. Gregory. The first named, a martyr to civil 
courage, lent to philosophy a consolatory and harmonious diction ; 
the latter, an indefatigable pontiff. has left as monuments in the 
history of the human mind his admirable treatises on the Holy 
Scriptures, and the system of chant which still retains his name. 
Jn later times, the Italian sun did not cease to shine upon genera- 
tions of philosophers, moralists, jurisconsults, publicists, and poets 
who esteemed it an honor to be accounted philosophers. We 
find Marsilius Ficinus confounding in his neo-Platonie enthusiasm 
science, art, and virtue; Macchiavelli, whom it suffices to name S 
Vico and Gravina tracing the fundamental laws of society, the 
one with hieroglyphic symbols, the other with the same pen that 
Jater will write out the statutes of the Arcadian Academy ; also 
Petrarch, crowned at the Capitol, but descending its steps to 
meditate by the light of his solitary lamp upon ‘ the remedies 
against both kinds of fortune ,” Tasso, resting from the combats 
of the Jerusalem Delivered in the composition of admirable 


dialogues, and, if we may be permitted to cite eelebri- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 99 


ties more recent and not less beloved, Manzoni and _ Pellico. 

We may then recognize among the philosophers of the other 
side of the Alps, a twofold character, ancient, permanent, and so 
to speak, national; for the permanence of habits, which consti- 
wtes personality with regard to individuals, constitutes also na- 
tionality in regard to populations. We may then say that there 
exists an Italian philosophy which has been able to maintain in their 
primitive alliance, moral tendencies and poetic form, whether it 
be that in that land so favored by heaven, in the presence of an 
external nature so wonderfully endowed, man also carries into 
his action a larger share of vivacity and felicity, or whether again, 
a design from on high so made Italy, that it might be the chief 
seat of the Catholic Faith, in which was to be founda philosophy 
at once pre-eminently practical and poetical, a union and a realiza- 
tion of the fundamental ideas of the True, the Good, and the 
Beautiful. 

II. In the Middle Ages, Italian philosophy was neither less 
flourishing nor Jess faithful to its twofold character. At the 
close of the ages of barbarian incursion, the Blessed Lanfrane and 
St. Anselm, who respectively went from Pavia and Aosta to oc- 
cupy the primatial see of Canterbury, inaugurated the revival of 
the regenerated studies in northern Europe. Peter the Lombard 
was borne by universal admiration from his professor's chair to 


the bishopric of Paris. Whilst John Ttalus made his name hon- 


100 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ored in the school of Vonstantinople, Gerard of Cremona, estab- 
lished at Toledo, was interrogating the learning of the Arabs, and 
teaching the Spaniards to enrich themselves with the scientifie 
spoils of their enemies. Bologna was the seat of an instructzor. 
in philosophy not lacking renown, even before the lessons in jur- 
isprudence began, which conferred such celebrity upon that city. 
Logic and physics continued to be assiduously taught there in the 
thirteenth century. Padua had no reason to euvy her rival.’ 
Milan numbered nearly two hundred teachers of grammar, logic, 
medicine, and philosophy.” Finally the fame of the thinkers of 
the Peninsula was so great in all parts of the continent that it 
served to account for the origin of newly arisen doctrines, for ex- 
ample, to explain how Arnold of Villeneuve passed for an adept 
of a Pythagorean sect disseminated through the principal cities 
of Apulia and Tuscany.* But the exuberant vigor of Italian phil- 
osophy showed itself especially in the memorable struggle which 
began between the orthodox systems and opposing theories, a 
struggle which, like the contest between the priesthood and the 
empire, lasted more than two hundred years. We might perhaps 
find interesting matter for research in the doctrines of the Frati- 


eelli, of Guillemin of Milan, and of the Spiritual Brothers, among 











1 Tiraboschi. t. iv.. lib. ii., cap. ii. 
4 Plamma, a Milanese chronicler, quoted by Tiraboschi, ibid. 


2 Vincentde Beauvais and Brucker, Hist. crit., Vol. i1., tx. it., chap. wy. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. JOI 


whom fhe absolute community of all things, she emancrpation of 
women in regard to religion, and the preaching of an eternal gos- 
pel, recall the modern efforts of Saint-Simonism. But, restricting 
ourselves to facts purely philosophical, we meet with matters still 
more surprising. In the year 1115, the Epicureans were numer- 
ous enough in Florence to form a faction to be dreaded and to 
provoke bloody quarrels; ! later, materialism appeared there as 
the avowed doctrine of sundry prominent Ghibellines. The grand- 
sons of Averroes were received at the Italian court of the Holien- 
staufen ? at the same time that a Saracen colony was founded at 
Nocera, making Rome tremble. Frederic II. rallied around him 
every perverted opinion, and seemed desirous of establishing a 
school antagonistic to Catholie teaching. This school, silenced 
fora time after the fall of the dynasty which had protected it, 
regained strength under another emperor, Louis of Bavaria, who 
crossed the Alps to receive the crown from the hand of an anti- 
pope. A little later, Petrarch, quoting St. Paul and St. Augustine 
in his discourses, excited a disdainful smile on the lips of the 
learned men by whom he was surrounded, adorers of Aristotle 


and of the Arabian commentators. * These irreligious doctrines 





1 Giovanni Villani, History, bk. iy. 
2 Agidius Romanus, Quodlibeta, lib. ii., quaest. 20.—Cf. Reinaud, Er- 
traits des historieris arabes, p. 435. 


5 Petrarch, quoted by Tiraboschi, Vol. v. 


102 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


made no delay in reducing themselves to learned pleasures of the 
senses: they found poets to sing them. However, the truth did 
not remain without defenders; two men were raised up in its 
behalf, whom we have already met among the greatest of their 
day, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura, wlo must here 
again be called to mind as two of the glories of Italy. Profound 
moralists, they were also poetically inspired, one, when he com- 
posed the hymns which were one day to make Santeuil despair, 
and the other, when he penned the canticle translated by Cor- 
neiile. Aigidius Colouna also combatted Averroism with the 
same pen which traced the lessons to kings. Albertano of Brescia 
published three treatises on ethics, in the vulgar tongue. We 
might cite still others, who were lauded in their own day, and 
who have experienced how far the plaudits of men are deceptive. 

But, of all the cities seated at the foot of tle Appenines, none 
could boast of a happier fecundity than the fair city of Florence. 
Torn by intestine commotions, if she gave birth amid pain and 
sorrow, at least she brought forth immortal children. Without 
counting Lapo Fiorentino, who taught philosophy at Bologna, and 
Sandro of Pipozzo, author of a treatise on economy which had a 
success of popularity, she numbered among her sons Brunetto 
Latini and Guido Cavaleanti. Brunetto, notary of the republic, 


' DelVamore e dilezione di Dio. Della consvlazione del consiylio. 





Ammaestramento di dire e di tacere. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 103 


had been able, without neglecting his patriotic functions, usefully 
to serve the cause of learning: he translated into Italian the 
Hthies of Aristotle; he prepared, under the name of Trésor, an 
encyclopzedia of the knowledge of his day, and in his Tesoretto he 
gave an example of didactic poetry lacking neither precision of 
thought nor grace of expression. Guido Cavaleanti was saluted 
as the Prince of the Lyre: a sonnet on love, composed by him, 
obtained the honor of several commentaries, to which the most 
revered theologians did not disdain to lend a hand. He would 
have been admired as a philosopher, if his orthodoxy had remained 
irreproachable.’ Two citizens of such ability sufficed to honor 
a city already famous; and yet a third was to appear who would 
make later times forget them both. 

III. The philosophy of the thirteenth century was then to ask 
from Italy the required poet; but Italy was to furnish him marked 
with the national imprint. equally provided with contemplative 
and with active faculties, and not less eminently endowed with 
the moral instincts than with the feeling and capacity for literary 
creation. It was needful to find a soul in which these disposi- 
tions, united by nature, should be largely developed by the trials 
of a life providentially predestined, a soul which, faithful to im- 
pressions received from without, should, moreover, possess the 


energy necessary to combine, and, in due season, bring them forth, 





' Boccaccio, quoted by Sismondi. Histoire des republiques italiensees, 
Vol. iy., p. 199. 


CHAPTER IV. 


LIFE, STUDIES, AND GENIUS OF DANTE.—GENERAL DESIGN OF THE 
DIVINE COMEDY.—PLACE OCCUPIED IN IT BY THE 
PHILOSOPHICAL ELEMENT. 

TN the year 1265, under sinister auspices, and in the house of 
il an exile, a child was born—Dante Alighieri. Memor- 
able events surrounded his cradle: the crusade of Tunis, the end 
put to the second interregnum by the election of Rudolph of Haps- 
burg, the second Council of Lyons, the Sicilian Vespers, the death 
of Ugolino—such were the possible topics of conversation to which 
his ears were first opened. He saw his country divided between 
the Guelfs and the Ghibellines: the former were the defenders of 
Italian independence and municipal liberties; the latter were the 
champions of feudal rights and the old suzerainty of the Holy 
Empire. His family traditions and his own inclinations attached 
him to the cause of the Guelfs; ! he donned the garb of manhood 
fighting in their ranks at Campaldino, where they were victorious 
(1289). Soon after, he shared in the dissensions which divided 
the dominant party, when, under the stormy tribunate of Giano 


della Bella (1292), the constitutions of the city were modified, the 





? Pelli, Memorie per la Vita di Dante; Lionardo Aretino, Vita di 
Dante. 
104 


Dante, and CatholicPhilosophy. 105 


nobles excluded from the magistracy, and the interests of the re- 
public placed in the hands of the plebeians. Entrusted success: 
ively with several embassies, when he returned to his own coun- 
try the highest honors and the greatest perils alike awaited him. 
When he was made prior, (1300), he found the nobles and the 
plebeians re-commencing the struggle under the new names of 
Neri and Bianchi; his sympathy with the latter procured for him 
the enmity of the former. While he was on the way to Rome to 
oppose their influence, they called to Florence Charles of Valois, 
brother to Philip the Fair; it seemed that a prince of a reigning 
house was none too exalted a personage to be employed in the 
struggle against a great citizen. The prince carried the day, but 
he dishonored himself and the French name when he caused a 
sentence of proscription to be pronounced against the chiefs of 
the Bianchi. Under the shadow of the French lilies two solemn 
iniquities, in the lapse of a few months, were accomplished in 
Italy: the exile of Dante and the seizure of Boniface VIII." 
Dante uttered maledictions upon his judges, but not upon his 
country; the memory he retained of her accompanied him as he 
wandered from city to city, and as he sat by the hearth-stones of 
the Marquises of Lunigiana, of the Scaligeri at Verona, or of the 
lords of Polenta, a sombre guest, always finding the bread of hos- 


pitality bitter. Now by force, and anon by entreaty, by every 





? Giov. Villani, lib. vii, ann. 1292; Dino Compagni, in Muratori. 


100 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


way except by such as might imply a loss of self-respect,! he at: 
tempted to re-enter within the dearly loved walls, the fold that 
had sheltered his early years.2 And, when his disappointed hope 
left him no other resource, if he seemed to pass into the camp of 
the Ghibellines, it was because he thought there to find that very 
cause of liberty to aid which he had fought against them: in fact, 
the intervention of France, solicited through the imprudence of 
the Guelfs, menaced Italy with a new peril. Or rather, these 
two names of rival factions had several times changed meaning 
amid intestine struggles; they continued as words of ominous au- 
gury, inscribed on standards which thenceforth rallied round them 
little more than selfish interests, passions, and crimes. _ Dante 
never ceased to blend in a common reprobation the excesses of 
both parties,’ and to look to some loftier sphere for social doctrines 
worthy of his devotion. The urgent call he experienced to inter- 
vene in the affairs of his time, which had brought upon him such 


singular misfortunes, never left him; he had just returned from 





1 Memorie.—M. Villemain was the first to make known in France the 
admirable letier wherein the poet refuses to re-enter his native city under 
humiliating conditions. But nowhere has the history of his exile been 
traced in a livelier and more lucid way than in the biography issued by M. 
Fauriel. See also the learned work of Balbo, Vita di Dante, and the Vie 
de Dante, by M. Artaud. 

2? Paradiso, XXV., 2, Longfellow’s Tr. 

“The fair sheepfold, where a lamb I slumbered.” 

3 Paradiso, VI., 34: 

“So that ‘tis hard to see which sins the most.” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 107 


the fulfilment of a diplomatic mission to Venice, when he died at 
Ravenna, (1321). The tumult of men and things was not lacking 
to his later days: there were the revolutions which changed into 
seigniorial governments the greater number of the Italian repub- 
lies, the popular triumphs in Flanders and Switzerland, the wars 
in Germany, the strife between France and England, the pontifi- 
cal majesty outraged at Anagni, the condemnation of the Tem- 
vlars, and the removal of the Holy See to Avignon. These tragic 
spectacles, which would have left profound images in the mem- 
ory of Dante if he had remained merely a witness of them, must, 
when he took part in them, have powertully affected his con- 
science; for the moral sense, which is awakened by the aspect of 
the just and the unjust, is exalted by adherence to the former, as 
also by experiencing the oppression of the latter. 

He had known evil through suffering, the chief school in which 
virtuous men learn it; he had known good by the joy felt in do- 
wg it; he had willedit with an ardent, and consequently with a 
communicative will. In after years the remembrance of his gen- 
erous intentions was for him as a companion of exile, in whose 
sonverse he found the justification of his political conduct, and 
she excuse for, as well as the consolation of, his misfortunes." 

II. But, to be conceived in exile and therein to die, to occupy 


iofty positions and to undergo great misfortunes, has been the lot 





1 Inferno, XXVIII., 39, 


108 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


of many; these are the points which Dante has in common with 
the crowd of men, and he might be confounded with them if, amid 
the agitations of his public life, other circumstances had not pro- 
cured for him a life of the heart, into the mysteries of which we 
must penetrate. In fact, according to the laws regulating the 
spiritual world, to lift up a soul there is need cf another soul; 
this attraction is called love; in the language of philosophy, it is 
known as friendship, and in that of Christianity, charity. Dante 
was not to be exempt from the common law. At the age of 
nine years, an age of which the innocence guarantees the purity, 
he met ata family festival, a young child endowed with grace 
and nobleness.1_ The sight called forth in him au affection which 
has no name on this earth, and which he preserved still more 
and more tender and chaste through the perilous season of ado- 
lescence. There were dreams wherein Beatrice showed herself all 
radiant; there was an inexpressible desire to find himself where 
she wes about to pass; it was a salutation from her, an inclina- 
tion of her head, in which he had placed all his happiness; there 
were fears and hopes, sadnesses and joys, which wrought upon 
and purified his sensibility, until it reached an extreme delicacy, 
disengaging it little by little from ordinary habits andcares. But 
above all, when Beatrice quitted the earth in the full splendor of 


youth, he followed her in thought into that invisible world of 





1 Boccacio, Vita di Dante; Dante, Vita Nuova. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 109 


which she had become an inhabitant, and delighted in ado. ning 
her with all the blooms of immortality; he surrounded her w ‘h 
the canticles of the angels; he seated her on the highest ste, 
leading to the throne of God. He forgot her death while con- 
templating her in this glorious transfiguration.’ Thus the beauty 
that had shown itself to him undera real form became a real 
type which interpenetrated his imagination, that imagination 
which was to mount higher and higher until it flowed over upon 
the outside world. He knew how to tell what was passing with- 
in him; he knew, according to lis own expression, to take note 
of love singing within: Dante had become a poet.” When once 
inspiration had visited him, he found, amid the favorable circum- 
stances of his position, no difficulty in retaining his visitor by 
his side: the contemporary of Guido Cavalcanti, of Giacopo de 
Todi, of Dante da Majano, of Cino da Pistoia, men whose poetic ut- 
terances called forth similar strains from their fellows, and were 
re-echoed among themselves as if in endless concert; the friend 
of the musician Casella, of the architect Arnolfo, and of the paint- 
er Giotto, he lived in the days when Florence raised three of the 


monuments which have caused that city to be surnamed “ The 








1 Vita Nuova, C. E. Norton’s translation : 
‘* Unto the high heaven hath Beatrice gone, 


Unto th :t realm where peace the angels have, 
* * * * * * * 
And dwelleth glorious in a fit abode.” 


2 Purgatorio, XXIV., 19. 


110 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Beautiful,” the Pallazzo Veechio, Santa Croce, and the Cathedral, 
and all this under an enchanting sky over-arching a land where 
every art flourished. 

ITT. All this was not yet enough, and Dante was to offer him- 
self to the wonder of posterity under still another aspect. Bru- 
netto Latini, who had known him from his birth and had drawn 
his horoscope, felt desirous of verifying its predictions; he be- 
came his master, and filled the place of the father lost at an early 
age; he taught him the rudiments of the different sorts of learn- 
ing collected in his 7résor.1 Through his care Dante was early 
initiated into familiarity with the languages. He was not wholly 
ignorant of Greek, and, if he had not acquired in it suffi- 
cient proficiency to be able easily to read the original texts, 
translations were not lacking.? Latin literature was familiar 





2 Inferno, XV., 19, 28,41. Cary’s translation : 
“* Tf thou,’ he answered, * follow but thy star, 
Thou canst not miss at last a glorious haven; 
Unless in fairer days my judgment erred.’ 
* * * * ‘In my mind 
Is fixed, and now strikes full upon my he rt, 
The dear benign, paternal image, such 
As thine was, when so lately thou didst teach me 
The way for men to win eternity.’ 
a * * ‘I commend my Treasure to thee. 
2 He quotes Greek etymologies quite happily in his dedication of the 
Paradiso to Can Grande, and in the Convito, lib. 1V., cap. VI. See a. the 
sonnet LXIV., Fraticelli’s edition ; 
** Morning and evening place thee at thy desk.”’ 


:99 


In the Thirteenth Century. 111 


to him; among the authors whose daily converse accompanied 
his solitude, he counted Virgil, whose dineid he knew from be- 
ginning to end, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Pliny, Frontinus, and Paulus 
Orosius. The different Romanie idioms had occupied his atten- 
tion; he quoted Spanish verses and wrote Proveneal poetry; ' 
there is no doubt that he knew French, “the speaking of which 
was already accounted delightful to hear, and the most common 
to all nations.” 2 But it was especially in exploring the dialects of 
Italy that he exerted his indefatigable perseverance; to have con- 
secrated the use of the vulgar tongue was by no means the least 
glorious of his achievements.’ Rhetoric and history, physics and 
astronomy, which he pursued down to the latest discoveries of 
the Arabian observers, claimed also a portion of his time. Obliged 
to choose among the various arts under which the inhabitants of 
Florence were classified, he inscribed himself in the corporation 
of physicians. This rank was not wrongfully assumed, and yet 
the variety of his aequirements would have permitted him to take 
without injustice the title of jurisconsult.t| His youth had passed 


away amid these wide-reaching preparations; the death of Bea- 





1 Dante, De Vulgari Hloquentia passim. The second canzone of book 
II. of his collection is in Provencal, Latin, and Italian. 

2 Brunetto Latini, preface of the T7résor. 

3 This is the special subject of his treatise, De Vulgari Eloquentia. 

4 Memorie. Purgatorio, XXV. See the learned dissertation of Varchi 
on this passage, and the whole book De Monarchia. 


Lie Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


trice (1292) induced him to seek consoling thoughts in the writ- 
ings of Cicero and Boethius. He there found more—the first 
vestiges of a science to which he had not yet attained, which 
apparently was thus lying in wait for him at the close of his pre- 
liminary studies—philosophy. From that period he pursued this 
study by attending the public discussions of such as were ac- 
counted philosophers, in monastic schools, in reading so assidu- 
ously that his eyesight was for a long time injured by his excess- 
ive application, and in meditations which no outside tumult could 
distract.'| The two translations of Aristotle, perhaps some of the 
dialogues of Plato, St Augustine and St Gregory the Great, 
Avicenna and the book De Causis, St. Bernard, Richard of St. 
Victor, St. Thomas Aquinas, gidius Colonna,—such were the 
guides whose footsteps his indefatigable thought eagerly followed. 
And yet, at the very entrance of metaphysics, the mystery of 
creation stayed him a long while, occasioned him at first some 
disquiet, and made him turn in preference to ethics.? 

At the end of thirty months, philosophy had become his ex- 
clusive mistress, to use his own form of speech, the lady of his 
thoughts. Then he began to find the intellectual sphere wherein 
he had essayed his first flight too restricted; he visited the Uni- 


versities of Italy and of the lands beyond the Alps, in search of 


1 Dante, Convito, lib. II., cap. XIII. ; lib. III., cap. 1X. 
2 Convito, IV., I. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 113 


that exchange of the living word, the benefit of oral teaching, 
which, better than the dead letter of the most renowned writings, 
possesses the gift of fecundating the mind. Similar motives had 
led the sages of Greece to the schools of Phoenicia and Egypt. 
However, the dates and the limits of Dante’s travels elude all 
certain determination. Several cities of the Peninsula, Padua, 
Cremona, Bologna, and Naples, claim the honor of having counted 
him in the number of their students, and the most illustrious 
provinces of Christendom, Germany and France, Flanders and 
England, have given testimony of their desire that he should have 
passed their way. There is apparently a possibility of tracing in 
his writings an itinerary which, passing through Arles, Paris, 
Bruges, and London, may have extended as far as Oxford.’ But 
we can scarcely doubt the fact of his sojourn in Paris. There in 
the Rue de Fouarre, and seated on the straw which served as 
benches to the crowd of students, he, an immortal disciple. at- 
tended the lessons of the professor, Sigicr, whom his mention 
alone rescued from oblivion, until in our day, a learned hand ap- 


peared to retrace the nearly obliterated memory.? There, doubt- 





1 Inferno, IX., 38; XII., 40; XV., 2; Paradiso, X., 47; etc., ete. 
2 Paradiso, X., 46: L. 
“Tt is the light eternal of Sigier, 
Who, reading lectures in the street of Straw, 
Did syllogize invidious verities.” 
The biograpby of Sigier, Which italian learning had despaired of eluci- 
dating, has been recovered with rare precision by the rescarches f M. 


114 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


less after long vigils, when he deemed he had won the right to 
aspire to the honors of the school, he sustained, with the custom- 
ary solemnities, a theological dispute, de quolibet wherein he re- 
plied without interruption upon fourteen questions, drawn from 
divers subjects, and proposed, with their arguments for and 
against, by skilful doctors. He also read and commented in pub- 
lic the Master of the Sentences and the Holy Scriptures, passing 
through all the probations required in the department of theology. 
Admitted to the highest rank, he lacked the means necessary 
to defray the cost of reception.’ The doors of the University 
were closed against him, as were the gates of his native city, and 
thus <ven science had for him a rigorous treatment. If he left 
Paris without the title of which he had been judged worthy, he 
was at least in possession of an incontestable erudition and a love 
for serious study; andif, as we may well believe, the lustre of 
Academic triumphs was not indifferent to him, his wishes were 
gratified in the end. After twenty years of exile (1320), grown 
erey with age, surrounded by the twofold majesty of renown and 
of misfortune, we find him in the chureh of St. Helen, at Verona, 


in presence of an admiring audience, sustaining a thesis de duobus 





Victor Leclere, president of the commission of the Academy of Inscripticns 
and Belles-lettres for the continuation of the Histoire litteraire te 
France. It is to be found in volume XXI. of that collection. 

1 Boceaccio.. Vita di Dante.. John of Serrayalle, Bishop of Imole in 
his commentary quoted by Tiraboschi, yol. V. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 115 


elementis aque 2t terre. One year later, when his obsequies were 
celebrated at Ravenna, Guido Novello, Lord of Polenta, his last 
protector, caused a crown of laurel to be placed upon his bier. + 

Dante had then lived, so to speak, a third life, which was de- 
voted to scientific labors, and which also had its unequal phases, 
its sad and its serene days. Political passions and the affections 
of the heart had not sufficed to occupy his whole being; there re- 
mained in his soul a large place, inaccessible to the tumult of 
opinions and the seduction of the senses, within which his intel- 
lect retired as within a sanctuary, and rendered unto truth an ex- 
elusive worship. This devotion was not restricted to the limits 
of any single order of knowledge; it embraced truth, absolute 
and complete. Universality of knowledge and elevation of the 
point of view—are not these the constituent elements of the phil- 
osophie mind ? 

IV. Thus in the person of Dante were found the three facul- 
ties which, united in certain proportions, constitute genius, name- 
ly, intellect to perceive, imagination to idealize, and will to ex- 
eute, The task still remains to tell hy what mysterious bonds 
these faculties were interwoven into a perfect unity; how three 
destinies weighed upon a single head which they might bow, but 
could not crush. While our ordinary education, by giving to 


each one of our faculties a separate and sometimes an exclusive 


ee eee As SS aa 
1 Memorie. 


116 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


cultivation, often divides and enfeebles them, Dante, a bold and 
independent genius, allowed his to grow and develop all together, 
to borrow resources from one another, and occasionally to inter- 
change voles in a way to present the most interesting contrasts. 
Now it is the statesman who speaks with the tongue of the sage 
or the muse to princes and to nations that have closed their 
ears to their customary counsellors... Again, it 1s the peet, who, 
amid the austere occupations of science, has not lost the delicate 
sense of the beauties of nature, the quickness to generous emo- 
tions, the ingenuous credulity which provokes a smile; he bends 
in loving reverence before the classic virtues of Cato; he believes 
in the bucklers which Numa saw falling from heaven, and in the 
veese of the Capitol.* But especially do we find him a philosoph- 
er, bearing with him a religious gravity to aid in the accomplish- 
ment of his poetie work, in the seclusion of studious habits, wait- 
ing for inspiration, concealing a learned reminiscence or the con- 
clusion of along chain of reasoning under the boldest images, 
ready to give a reason for every line that has ever flowed from his 
pen: his seruples carried him so far that he desired to expiain 
ex-professo, by « rigorous logical analysis, the ballads and sonnets 


wherein his youthful vigor had made its first essay. Strong 








1 De Monarchia; Purgatorio, VI.; Paradiso, VI., etc. 

2 Purgatorio, 1; Convito, 1V., 5,28: ‘*‘O most sacred breast of Cato, who 
will dare to speak of thee?’’ De Monarchia, IT. 

8 Vita Nuova, passim. Lionardo Aretino, Vita di Dante. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 7 


with that real strength which is not rigidity, which is supple be- 
catise it is living, Dante knew how to take his share in the needs 
and duties of life, and then to make his wide experiences con- 
verge in unwearying devotion to his more cspecial occupations, 
He never deemed that application to letters constituted a species 
of priesthood exempt from public burdens; he did not deprive his 
country of his time that he might make for himself a life of self- 
ish leisure. His eloquence, never prodigally expended, flowed 
freely forth in the councils, as did his blood under the standard 
of his native city. It was this desire to multiply himself in a 
certain fashion for the general good, ordinarily confided to inex- 
pert hands, which made him exclaim, when hesitating whether or 
not to accept a certain diplomatic mission: “If [stay, who goes? 
and if I go, who stays?”! 

He also knew how to fulfil the gentle requirements of social 
life. Friendship found him faithful to its demands; his melan- 
choly countenance brightened in the society of women and young 
people ; friends vaunted the grace of his manners and the courtesy 
of his speech amid such surroundings. As he did not hide him- 
self in haughty retirement, neither did he intrench himself in the 
domain where he was sure of reigning; he did not disdain to 
cultivate arts, such as music and drawing, in which he could 


readily meet with others more skilled than himself.2 However, a 





1 Boceaccio, Vila di Dante: ** S’io sto chi va? e s’io yo chi sta?” 
2 Boceaceio, Vita di Dante. Villani somewhere mentioning him, calls 


118 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


rare temperance, a sel{-possession that could seize upon the wost 
fleeting opportunities for learning, an attention so rapt that noth- 
ing could deprive it of its prey. and finally, a memory to which 
the mournful necessity of re-learning anything was unknown, 
permitted him to pursue his favorite studies, and made it seem as 
if time were less avaricious of hours to him than to other men. 
Thus he was seen sitting in the principal street of Sienna, bending 
over a book, totally absorbed during the entire continuance of a 
public festival, of which he seemed not even to be aware. 

But, as human nature must always betray in some spot the 
original wound by which it has been weakened, the noble quali- 
ties of Dante were occasionally dishonored by their own very 
excesses. Amid civil feuds his hatred of iniquity became a blind 
rage which could no longer grant pardon even to mistakes. 
Under such circumstances it is said that, in the confusion of his 
thoughts, he would throw stones at women and children whom 
he heard calumniating his party. Or again, whenin aphilosophic 
discussion he foresaw certain objections on the part of his adver- 
saries, he gave vent to his indignation by saying: “Such brutal 


doctrines ought to be met, not with arguments, but with a 





him ( History, Bk. 1X., chap. cxxxiy.),‘‘ An ungracious philosopher.”’ But 
we may well believe that he represents the poet in his darker moments; 
those, for instance, which he was obliged to pass among courtiers and 
»uffoons, at the courts of some of the great lords. See also Memorie per 
la Vita di Dante, Pelli. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 119 


xnite.” ' Likewise. his extreme seusibility, although protected hy 
the memory of Beatrice. made but a feeble resistance to the se- 
ductions of beauty: the collections of his lyrics has kept the 
traces of these passing affections, which he vainly endeavored 
haif-way to veil by ingenious interpretations. ? Even study, the 
refuge of so many soreiy tempted souls, had snares for him. The 
knowledge of oneself, so highly recommended by antique wisdom, 
is not without danger for great men; it exposes them to share by 
anticipation in the admiration of posterity. The friends of Dante 
have regretted that he did not leave to them the entire care of 
his fame; we are pained when we see him anxious for honors 
seareely worthy of him. it is impossible not to recognize in his 
writings a learnmg sometimes inopportune, which _ solicits 
applause by oecasioning surprise, and locutions voluntarily obscure 
whieh humiliate the simplicity of the reader. These faults bear 
their own penalty with them; for by rendering their author less 
accessible, they sometimes deprive him of the familiar and effec- 
tionate homage proffered by the lips of the masses of his fellow- 
beings.® 


And yet these weaknesses, to make themselves forgotten, are 








1 Boccaccio, Vita di Dante ; Convito, IV., 14. 

2 Canzoni, passim; Convito, II. Dionisi gravely maintains the hypothesis 
which makes of the loves of Dante so many allegories, and of Gentucca, 
simply a figure of the party of the Bianchi. 

3 Inferno, XXXIV., 80; Purgatorio, I1., 1, ete., ete. 


120 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


possessed of a wonderful secret—repentance. In the thirteenth 
century the art, now so common, of endeavoring to legitimate vice 
by the advancement of easy-going doctrines, was but little known. 
Men then came, sooner or later, to ask at the hands of religion, the 
expiation and the grace of which she is the ever-enduring dispen- 
satrix. And thus did our poet. In one of his most beautiful can- 
tos he represents himself ‘‘ with downcast eyes like to a child con- 
fessing its faults,” acknowledging in the face of all the ages the 
errors of his youth.’ Later, he left as his last will and testament 
the hymn to the Blessed Virgin, wherein he offers tears from his 
heart as the ransom for the evil days that he had lived. He 
wished to be garbed on his bier in the habit of St. Francis? Any- 
thing farther is the secret of God, who alone could judge that 
character, one of the greatest that ever came forth from His crea- 
tive hand to play its part here below. His contemporaries failed 
to comprehend him. Their wonder found expression in fabulous 
tales, and Dante had his legend. A prophetic dream was spoken 
of, sent to his mother on the eve of his birth; the reality of his 
journeys through the realm of the dead was positively affirmed; a 
double miracle was said to have preserved his poem, twice lost; 


several days after leaving the earth he was announced as having 


' Purgatorio, xxx., 36; xxxi., 12, 22, etc. See also ibid., 14. He con- 
fesses himself inclined to pride, ibid., xiii., 43; and to anger, xv. in fine. 

2 See the sonnet. ‘‘O Mother of Virtue!’ See also Memorie per la 
Vita di Dante 





Ln the Thirteenth Century. 121 


appeared, crowned with a luminous aurcole,' If he was not per- 
mitted to share in the incense offered to the saints, that due to 
poets was never lacking to him. 

To the divers. vicissitudes, political, poetic, and scientific. 
through which Dante passed, correspond three sorts of works, re- 
vealing his indefatigable activity: Ist, the treatise De Monarchia, 
a learned theory of the constitution of the Holy Empire, which, 
binding the organization of Christian Europe to the traditions of 
the ancient Roman Empire, looked for the ultimate origin of pow- 
er and of society in the depths of the designs of Providence: 2d, 
the Rime, or lyrie compositions, the Vita Nuova, an ingenuous con- 
fession of the youthful life of the author, and the two books De 
Vulgari Eloquentia, a sketch of the philological labors by means 
of which he was enabled to make of the vulgar idiom, until then 
disdained, an instrument worthy of expressing the noblest aspira- 
tions: 3d, the Convito, or banquet, wherein he proposes to. place 
within the reach of the mass of men the bread, but too rare, of 
knowledge, and scatters abroad with a liberal and beneficent hand 
the philosophical ideas gathered by him in communion with the 


sages of antiquity and the doctors of later times.? These were all 





» Boccaccio, Vita; Benvenuto da Imola, Preefatio ad Divin. Comoed. 
2 We must add to these his Latin Eclogues, published by Dionisi, and 
nis thesis, de duobus Elementis, printed twice at Venice, in 1508 and 


1708. These small works are nor included in the edition issued by Zatta. 


122 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


simply preludes or episodes. The entirety of his genius was to 
be brought forth in a unique work: the Divine Comedy was con- ” 
ceived. 

VY. The frame-work of the Divine Comedy was to be drawn 
from the usages of the period and the examples afforded by the 
ancients, or rather, from the entire past of poetry. Poetry, in its 
noblest flight, is an intuition of the infinite; it is the perception 
of God in creation; the unchangeable destiny of man represented 
amid the vicissitudes of history 

This is why it appears at its origin clothed with a sacerdotal 
character, taking its part in prayer and in religious instruction ; 
and this is, also, why, even in times of decadence, the em- 
ployment of the marvellous remains one of the privileges, 
even precepts, of the poetic art. Thus, in pagan days, 
the great Oriental compositions, such as the Mahabharata ; 
the Greek cycles, such as those of Hercules, Theseus, Orpheus, 
Ulysses, Psyche; the Latin epics of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Silius 
Italicus; and finally, works which may be called philosophical 
poems, such as the Republic of Plato and that of Cicero, all had their 
journeys to heaven, their descents into hell, their necromancies, 
and their dead resuscitated, or reappearing to tell of the mysteries 
of the future life. Christianity naturally, and toa still greater 
degree, fayored the intervention of the supernatural in the litera- 


ture formed under its auspices. From the visions contained in the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 123 


Old and New Testaments descended the train of ideas whence 
arose the first legends; the martyrs were visited in their prisons by 
prophetic visions; the anchorites of the Thebaid and the monks 
of Mt. Athos had narratives to proffer which found echoes in Irish 
monasteries and the cells of Monte Cassino. The Provengal 
Troubadours, the Trowveéres of France, the German Meistersingers, 
and the later Scandinavian Skalds availed themselves of the data 
furnished by the hagiographers, and added to them the charms of 
rhythm and of song. Nothing was more famous in the thirteenth 
century than were the dreams of St. Perpetua and St. Cyprian, 
the pilgrimage of St. Macarius the Roman to the terrestrial para- 
dise, the trance of the young Alberic, the purgatory of St. Patrick, 
and the miraculous voyages of St. Brendan. Thus, numerous ex- 
amples and contemporary literary usages corresponded with the 
Faith, which shows us the eternal regions as the country of the 
soul, the natural dwelling-place of thought. Dante understood 
this, and, overstepping the limitations of space and time to enter 
into the triple kingdom of which the gates are opened by death, 
he placed the scene of his poem, from its primal conception, in 
the realm of the infinite.’ 


There he found himself on the meeting-ground of all genera- 





1 Onthe poetic antecedents of the Divine Comedy there exists an in- 
teresting but too brief dissertation by Foscolo, Edinburgh Review, vol. 


XXX 


124 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tions, in possession of a horizon which will be that of the Last 
Judgment, embracing within its limits all the families of the hu- 
man race. He was present at the final solution of the enigma of 
revolutions. He judged the nations and the leaders of the na- 
tions; he stood in the place of Him who will one day cease to be 
patient, and he dispensed, according to his own will, the awards 
in the treasury of recompense and punishment. He took the op- 
portunity of setting forth with epie grandeur liis political theories, 
and of executing, with that rod of satire which prophets have not 
disdained to wield, his scheme of pitiless retributiou.!| And there, 
as a traveller whose arrival is duly awaited, he was met by Bea- 
trice, who had preceded him but a short time; he beheld her such 
as his fairest dreams had represented her; he had his share in 
her triumph. This celestial triumph had, perhaps, been the 
primal and generating idea of the Divine Comedy, conceived as 
an elegy wherein should be reflected the sorrows and the con- 
solations of a pious love.? In short, all things appeared to him 
from their proper point of view; he overlooked creation, of which 
no corner, however obscure, could escape his glance; he felt im- 


pelled to show the prodigious variety of his learning and the pro- 





1 Psaims, passim ; Isaias, xliy., 12; ete. 
2 Dante, Vita Nuova, in fine. ‘tA wonderful vision appeared to me, 
in which I saw things that made me resolve to speak no more of thir 


blessed one (Beatrice) until I could more worthily treat of her,” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 125 


fundity of his views; as a didactic poet, he could here sketch 
out the entire system of an admirable philosophy. 

Now, philosophy, with the severity of its learned forms, could 
occupy only a restricted space, and did not readily unite with the 
other elements of the poem; some means was needed by the aid 
of which it might be transformed, and, by an intimate transfu- 
sion, he felt in every part of the whole. This means was symbol- 
ism, a philosophical method of procedure, since it rests upon the 
incontrovertible law of the association of ideas, and it is, besides, 
eminently poetical ; for, while prose places immediately under the 
sign of the word the thought to be conveyed, poetry places there 
images, Which are themselves signs of a still higher thought. 
But the image destined thus to serve as a middle term between 
the word and the thought, ought not to be carelessly chosen ; 
still less ought it to be composed of fantastic features, capriciously 
combined. The required image must be sought for in the order of 
realities, that it may offer a faithful analogy with the idea which 
it represents, that indeed, according to the original force of the 
word (adp60hov) one may really find it a symbol—that is, a 
throwing or bringing together. Combinations of this sort are 
abundant in nature—the song of the birds is the sign of the day, 
and the first blooming of a flowering plant that of the season ; the 
shadow of a reed on the sand measures the height of the sun in 


the heavens. The poets of the olden times felt these universal 


126 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


harmonies; everything appeared to them environed by all its re- 
lations ; for them every comparison was a serious matter; they 
regarded as positive beliefs the myths to which they gave ingen- 
ious interpretations. So, likewise, in the Holy Scriptures, each 
event recorded has both a real existence and a figurative significa- 
tion: each one of its most illustrious personages fulfils at the 
same time a historic part and a prophetic function. The genius 
of Dante, nourished on the traditions of the Bible, naturally 
proceeded in the same manner. The persons whom he places 
on the scene are real in his thought and significative in his inten- 
tion; they are incarnate ideas, tiving symbols.!' The actions which 
he imputes to them express the relations of the ideas under the 
name of which they act. In short, the whole of the Divine Com- 
edy is penetrated by an allegorical teaching which forms its inner 
life. He himself declares this in the dedication of the Paradiso to 
Can Grande della Seala: ‘It must be understood that the sense 


of this work is not single, but multiple. The first sense is that 


1 Thus Rachel and Lia, Mary and Martha, represent for him contempla- 
tion and action (Purgatorio, xxvii. 33; Convito iv. 17). Also Peter, James, 
and John are figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity (Paradiso, xxiv.—xXv.). 
In the same way, even in his prose writings-~as, for instance, in the Con- 
vito—he is fond of rendering his idea more striking by taking as types cer- 
tain poetical personages. He borrows from Siatius, Virgil, Ovid, and Lu- 
can, four heroes, that he may the better represent in their persons the char- 


acteristics of the four ages of life. (Convito, xxv.—xxviii.) 


In the Thirteenth Century. 127 


whichis shown under the letter; the second is that which is hid- 
den under the things expressed by the letter; the first is calied lit- 
eral, the second allegorical or moral. According to these consid- 
erations, it is evident that the subject must be twofold, that it may 
lend itself alternately to the two senses indicated. The subject 
of the work, literally taken, is the state of souls after death; this 
is the pivotal idea of the poem throughout its entire course. In 
the allegorical sense, the poet treats of the hell of this world, 
through which we are journeying as pilgrims, with the power of 
meriting and demeriting; and the subject is man, inasmuch as by 
uis merits and his demerits he is subjected to the divine justice, re- 
raunerative or retributive. The species of philosophy which the au- 
thor has embraced, is moral philosophy or ethics, for the end which 
ie has proposed to himself is a practical one, and not mere idle 
speculation ; and if in some passages he seems to speculate, it is 
with a view to application, according to what the philosopher 
(Aristotle) says in the second book of his Metaphysics: Practical 
men sometimes indulge in speculation, but in a passing manner, 
and with a view to subsequent application.” ! 

Giacopo di Dante, as heir to the paternal traditions, develops 
still more clearly the moral purpose of the poem in the preface of 
the commentary undertaken by him, the correctness of which is 


guaranteed by his filial piety: “The whole work is divided into 





1 Epist. dedicat. ad Can Grande. 


128 Dante, and Catholte Philosophy 


three parts, of which the first is named Hell; the second, Purga- 
tory; the third and last, Paradise. 1 will begin explaining in a 
general way, the allegorical character, by saying that the principal 
design of the author is to show figuratively the three modes of 
being of the human race. In the first part he considers vice, which 
he calls Hell, to make us understand that vice is opposed to virtue 
as to its contrary, as the place chosen for its punishment is named 
Infer-o, by reason of its low position, its remoteness from the 
heights of heaven. The second part has for its subject the tran- 
sition from vice to virtue, which he names Purgatory, to show 
the transformation of the soul which is purged of its faults in time, 
for time is the medium in which every transformation must take 
place. The third and last part is that wherein he treats of men 
made perfect, and he calls it Paradise, to express the loftiness of 
ti Ir virtues and the greatness of their happiness, two conditions 
without which we could not discern the sovereign good. Thus is 
it that the author proceeds in the three parts of the poem, always 
by means of the figures employed progressing toward the accom- 


plishment of his design.” The earliest commentators adopt and 


reproduce this explanation. } 





* Giacopo di Dante comprises in his commentary only the first part of the 
Divine Comedy. This commentary, valuable through the biographical in- 
formation it may contain, ought tobe brought to light. We found the pre- 
face to it, interesting in divers respects, in a manuscript contained in the 


Bibliotheque du Roi. Tt bears the number 7765. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 129 


VI. Before proceeding farther, we shall do well to glance back- 
ward for a moment. We have seen how the general transitional 
movement which was accomplished in European society, from the 
thirteenth to the fourteenth century, was to make itself felt in 
the progress of the human mind; how philosophy, having reached 


the highest point of its scholastic period, felt the need of popular- 





Another beautiful manuscript, numbered 7002, contains the Divine Com- 
edy, preceded by the prefaces of Benvenuto da Imola, and accompanied 
by the commentary of Giacopo della Lana, the two earliest interpreters 
who undertook a complete explanation of the poem. The following ex- 
tracts relate to the subject cecupying our attention at the present moment. 

Benvenuto da Imola: ** The matter or subject of this book is the state of 
the human soul, both as connected with the human body and as separated 
from it. As the state of the whole is threefold, so does the author divide 
his work into three parts. A soul may be in sin; such a one, even while 
it lives with the body, is, morally speaking, dead, and hence is in the 
moral Hell; when separated from the body, if it died incurably obstinate, 
it isin the actual Hell. Again, a soul may be receding from vice ; such a one, 
while still in the body, is in the moral Purgatory, or in the act of penance 
in which it purges away its sin ; if separated, it is in the actual Purgatory. 
Yet again, a soul may dwell in the perfect habit of virtue; even while 
living in the body it is already, in a manner, in Paradise, for it exists 
in as great felicity as is possible in this life of misery ; separated from the 
body, it is in the heavenly Paranine where there is true and perfect happi- 
ness, where it enjoys the vision of God.”’ 

Giacopo della Lana: * And since our author, Dante, considers human life 


to exist in three conditions—the life of the vicious, that of the penitent, 


130 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


izing itself, and of taking on an enduring form in the songs of a 
poet; how it found the required singer among the pupils of that 
old Italian school in which the service of the true was never 
separated from the service of the beautiful and the good; how. 
finally, the vicissitudes of Dante’s life developed in him the thirce- 


fold sense: moral, esthetic, and intellectual. This triple germ, 





and that of the virtuous—he has divided his book into three parts, namely. 
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.” 

One might perhaps object to these testimonies the example of Tasso, who 
also wished to apply to the fictions of the Jerusalem Delivered an allegori- 
cal sense, justly set aside by bis admirers. But thisafterthought of Tasso, 
a caprice of his later days, can, by no means, be compared to the tenacious 
habits of mind influencing the poet of the thirteenth century, habits be- 
trayed in the first writings of his youth (Vita Nova). set forth without 
circumloecution in those of bis maturity (Convito), and several times referr- 
ed to in the course of the Divine Comedy (Inferno, ix. ; Purgatorio, viii.) 
as if indeed, by a fortunate solicitude, to meet any possible hesitation on 
the part of future readers. 

We will not conclude this note without rectifying an omission which 
would be unjust. When we were presuming the poetic intentions of Dante 
to have been almost entirely misunderstood by French critics, we were not 
acquainted with the dissertation of the late M. Bach on the state of souls 
after death according to Dante and St.Thomas, nor with the interesting 
chapter which M. Delecluze devoted to Dante considered as a philosophical 


poet. (Florence et ses Vicissitudes, vol. I.) 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 131 


which obtained its growth under the influence of a persistent 
course of culture, was destined to bear wondrous fruit—the 
Divine Comedy; and this fruit, laid open by analysis, was to 
liberate from its brilliant and odorous euvelope the seeds of philoso- 
phy therein enclosed. 

Thus have we watched the adventofa great man. Like to oue 
of the double-visaged divinities adored by the Romans, he has ap- 
péared tous as if looking in two directions—toward the past, of 
which he is the representative, and again toward the future, of 
which he is the precursor. His is a generous nature, giving out 
more than it has received. He is the epitome of an epoch and ofa 
country--to speak in the language of the scholastics, the period 
and the land are the matter composing him—but he epitomizes 
them in a powerful personality, and this is the form which con- 
stitutes him. We have followed the formation of an immor- 
tal book; such works last as long as humanity itself, which they 
never cease to interest, because they have given expression to an 
entire phase of human history, and are connected with all that is 
immutable in the thoughts and affections of the human race. 
While pointing out some of_the sources of the Divine Comedy, we 
have found them extending back into the farthest depths of his- 
tory; but we likewise find in the poem the expression of all the 
subjects of interest—political, literary, and scientific— of contem- 


poraneous society. Also, in the principal work, and in the lesser 


132 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


writings that form its complement, we have traced the presence of 
a wide philosophical system, the detailed exposition of which 
must now oceupy us, and of which we may lay down beforehaid 
the general characteristics according to the correlated facts which 
lave been the object of our preliminary researches. This philosophy 
will be eclectic in its doctrines, as were all the most illustrious 
teachings of the time; poetical in its form and ethical in its diree- 
tion, as was required by the habits of thought of the nationality 
to which Dante belonged; it will be like the mind of its author, 
bold in its flight and encyclopedic in the extent embraced by it. 
For a philosophical system may be compared to a placid spring of 
liviug water: the genius of him who professes it is like the basin 
coutaining it and giving toit its configuration, while the circum- 
stances of time and place resemble the atmosphere which environs 
it, influencing its temperature, and supplying the currents of air hy 


which its surface is ruffled. 


PAB T It. 





Exposition of Dante’s Philosophical Doctrines. 
(Ciel aE AE) IRS le 
PROLEGOMENA. 

On the threshold of every philosophical system, one inevitable 
question must be met, and that is, the definition of philosophy 
itself. To define philosophy, is to determine the place it occu- 
pies in the order of our knowledge, the relations it bears to such 
departments of that knowledge as seem to be most nearly allied 
to it, the parts of which it is composed, and the method which it 


pursues. 


2 

Dante believed in the maxim common among sages of all peri- 
ods, and especially dear to poets—that there exists a preestablish- 
ed harmony between the works of God and the conceptions of 
men, and that man is an abridgment of the universe. He did not 
wholly reject confidence in the speculations of astrology which 
sought to develop this idea by establishing sundry correspondences 
between the phases of the revolutions of celestial bodies and those 
of our terrestrial life. As, in the Ptolemaic system, nine heavens, 


superposed one above the other, environed the earth, throwing 


134 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


light upon all material things, exerting divers influences on the 
ecneration of beings, on temperaments, characters, the passions, 
and other phenomena of the moral world; so, according to the ency- 
clopedic system of Dante, did nine sciences enclose the human 
mind, illuminating intelligible things, and diffusing fecundity and 
variety throughout the world of thought. To the seven heavens 
of the seven planets correspond, by analogies too elaborate to be 
here treated of, the seven arts of the ¢triviwm and quadriviun. 
The eighth sphere, with its brilliant stars and its milky way, its two 
poles visible and invisible, its two motions, brings to mind physics 
and metaphysies, blending with one another, notwithstanding 
their unequal lights and their differing tendencies. The crystal- 
line heaven, or primum mobile, which carries along with it all the 
rest, is like to ethies, whence starts the impulse which moves all 
the other intellectual spheres. And as beyond these material orbs 
extends the empyrean heaven, pure light, immutable in its repose, 
so, above all profane sciences, is found theology, where truth re- 
poses in radiant and peaceful obviousness. Physics, metaphysics, 
and ethies, are, then, the last rounds of the scientific ladder to 
which éir natural powers can attain: we unite the three under 
the name of philosophy.' Philosophy, in the entire sense of 
its etymology, is still more: it is a sacred affection, a holy love, 


of which the object is wisdom. And as wisdom and love no- 











1 Convito, ii. 14. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 135 


where exist more perfectly united than in God Himself, it is per- 
mitted to say that philosophy is of the divine essence, that it is 
the eternal thought, the eternal complacency reflected back upon 
itself, the daughter, the sister, the spouse of the sovereign ruler 
of the universe. ? 
II. 
This idea of philosophy will take shape, and, brought face to 


face with theology, it will better show us what are the points of 
contact, and what the points of distinction. ‘In the midway of 
this our mortal life,” in adark and lonely forest, wherein through the 
intoxieation of the senses he had gone astray, at the foot of a hill 
from whose ascent he is barred by the appearance of three mons- 
ters, the poet becomes alarmed: the Queen of heaven has seen his 
plight, and has taken pity on him; she speaks to St. Lucy, who 
calls upon Beatrice; Beatrice descends from heaven, and Virgil, at 
her invitation, quits the lower regions; the two will save the 


wandering poet, by each in turn conducting him on his way through 


1 Convito, ii. 16; iii. 12,14, 15.—Cf. Hugh of St. Victor; Eruditionis di- 





dascalicae, lib. I. 3311.1. (Throughout Part II. of this work, the reader 
is asked to bear in mind that the object of the author is to present as 
exact an analysis of Dante’s philosophy ashe can gather from the 
various writings of the Florentine poet. The translator has deemed this 
reminder useful, from the fact that occasionally the author might be 
thought to be speaking from himself, whereas he endeayors to be merely 


the mouthpiece of Dante. Tr.) 


136 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the regions of eternity. The main features of this narration 
are historical: the wanderings of Dante from the right path, his 
special devotion towards theVirgin Mother, and the blessed Lucy 
(formerly so dear to Italian piety); the place which he had award- 
ed to Beatrice in his affections, and to Virgil in his studies. But 
these real persons are also figures: the poet himself isa complete 
image of humanity, with its sublime instincts and its inexpressible 
weaknesses; the Blessed Virgin Mary, so tenderly merciful, rep- 
resents the divine clemency. This example of contemporary hag- 
iographers, accustomed to look for mysterious virtues in the very 
names of the saints, authorized the use of the name of Lucy to 
express illuminating grace.2 But especially Beatrice, who had 
happily acquired so great an ascendency over the soul of Dante, 
who had separated him from the crowd of ordinary minds, who 
later, by dying, had lifted him in thought to the dwelling-place of 
the elect, who had appeared to him as a ray of the divine beauty 
—Beatrice was no longer to be for hima simple daughter of men, 
but an inspiring intelligence, a tenth muse, the muse who in that 


age overtopped all the rest, Theology.3 Last comes Virgil, at 





1 Inferno, i. and ii.; Convito, iv. 24. ‘* The wildering wild-wood of this 
life.” 

? This is the interpretation of all the commentators. 

5 Passages in which Beatrice is taken as the symbol of Theology. Infer- 


no, li. 26, 35; Purgatorio, vi., 16; xviii., 16. L. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 137 


that period considered under an aspect not at all familiar to us, as 
one of the precursors of religious truth in the midst of the pagan 
world (by reason of his fourth eclogue), and likewise, owing to 
the exaggerations of his commentators, as the depositary of all the 
learning of antiquity. ! 

Virgil, in the eyes of Dante, was master of all human science, 


that is tosay, of philosophy.* Thus in the relations of the two 








O Lady of virtue, thou alone through whom 
The human race exceedeth all contained 
Within the heaven that has the lesser circles! 
. . « . Beatrice, the true praise of God. 
. . + . .Jnso deep a questioning 

Do not decide, unless she tell it thee, 

Who light *twixt truth and intellect shall be. 
. . . . .What reason seeth here, 

Myself can tell thee; beyond that await 

For Beatrice, since ’tis a work of faith. 

See also Purgatorio, xviii. 25; xxx. 11; xxxi. 12, 37, 41; xxxii. 32; 
XXxXiii. 89; Paradiso, i. 19, 24; iv. 22,39; xviii. 6; xxviii. 1; xxxi. 28. 

1 See the fragment of acommentary by Bernard de Chartres on the first 
six books of the Aneid, at the end of the works of Abelard, issued by 
M. Cousin, 

2 Virgil represents Philosophy: Inferno, i.; iv.; vii.; xi.; Purgatorio, 
vi.; xviii. L. 

B Ono 6 oe 6 oc ao oui minihiRergr 


O thou who honorest every art and science, 


138 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


poetical personages, we must recognize those of the two orders of 
ideas personified in them. 

Now, the divisions of knowledge are like those found in nature; 
they constitute a chain of which each link closes only after an- 
other one has been clasped within it. There is a natural theol- 
ogy which belongs in the domain of philosophical studies; there 
are philosophical studies, the aid of which is borrowed by theol- 
ogy. Or rather, philosophy has two parts; the first is the preface 
to, and the second is the commentary on, theology; the first is 
the anticipation, the second the development, of faith by reason. 
In the history of the individual man, as in the history of human- 
ity, faith is the primitive fact. It descends by the word into the 
darkness of our ignorance, it there awakens reason and causes it 
to pass from potentiality to act; faith, then, by an insensible and 
continuous influence sustains reason in its unsteady onward way, 
until, at length, when reason has reached the end of its natural 
course, faith, making itself visible, receives from it, with its rev- 


erential homage, its acquired ideas and its customary forms of 


-That benignant Sage, who all things knew. 


O Sun, that healest all distempered vision. 
O light of mine. 
The lofty Teacher. 4 
- What reason naeot here 

Myself can tell thee ;. 
Explanation of the prophetic sense of the afath ec inons Purgatorio, 


Xxii., 24, 


In the Thirteenth Century. 139 


procedure. Thus, by an admirable concurrence, the education of 
ihe intelligence is accomplished. It is according to this broad 
conception of philosophy that we may explain, in a satisfactory 
way, the parts played by Virgil and Beatrice. We see why Bea- 
trice, clothed with the authority of faith, descends into the infer- 
nal night to bring forth from it Virgil, who represents reason. 
We understand the functions of the pagan sage when he pene- 
trates into the depths of hell or climbs the heights of purgatory, 
when he stops at the entrance to the celestial regions, when the 
secrets of the material world or of the moral life seem familiar to 
him, or when he recognizes and proposes problems of a higher 
order, and, although ordinarily declining their solution, sometimes 
cannot help allowing the solution to be divined. We know why 
the Christian damosel affords a secret and constant assistance, 
until she, at length, appears in all her glory on the confines be- 
tween heaven and earth; and why, while ever rising in the re- 
gions of space, and drawing nearer and nearer to the Divinity, she 
does not disdain to suspend her contemplations and to solve the 
questions propounded by him who had preceded her. Finally, 
we clearly conceive the marvellous association of Virgil and Bea- 
trice to conduct the poet, that is to say, man, to peace, freedom, 


to that spiritual health which is the germ of eternal life.’ 





1 Inferno, ii., 17; Purgatorio, i., 18; vii-, 8; xxi., 11; xxiii., 43; 


xXxvii., 46; xxx.,17. Paradiso, ii., 21; xxxi., 29, 


140 _ Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


IL. 

While we thus recognize the external relations of philosophy, its 
internal constitution may be determined. We have already seen 
that it comprises physics, metaphysics, and ethics; in fact, the 
teachings of the two allegorical personages embrace man, nature, 
and the beings that are beyond both of these. In this enumera- 
tion, logic is apparently left on one side. It would almost seem 
as if the bold poet disdained it (plainly not in its proper use, but 
in certain everweening pretensions made for it. Tr.); he rises up 
against sundry of the questions with which the School loved to 
play: ‘* What is the number of the motors of the heavens? if 
the necessary and the contingent are given in the major and the 
minor, can the necessary be found in the conclusion? if we must 
admit the existence of a primum mobile? if in a semicircle any 
triangle other than a right-angled triangle can be inscribed?” ? 
He estimates freely the value of the formulas of reasoning in which 
the majority of his contemporaries placed unlimited confidence ; he 
distinguishes the concatenation of truths from that of the terms 
which are their signs; and, if the true is found in the conclusion of 
the syllogism, he says itis there found because it was already pres- 
ent under the words of the premises. He leaves the art of reas- 
oning, comprised under the name of dialectics, in the second de- 


gree of the trivium; and, following the system of analogies pre- 





! Paradiso, xiii., 33. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 141 


viously indicated, he compares it to the second planet, Mercury: 
as Mercury is the smallest of the stars, and the one most com- 
pletely veiled by the brightness of the sun, so dialectics is of all 
the sciences, that which is reduced to the narrowest proportions, 
and can the most easily be hidden under the specious veil of soph- 
istry. Finally, he endows the evil spirits with a knowledge of 
this science, and makes ademon boast of being a logician.2, How- 
ever, the wise precepts which must temper the labors of thought, 
are not neglected by him; he connects them with the study of 
the intellectual phenomena whence they are derived, thus with 
the whole of psychology, under the denomination of ethics or 
moral philosophy. In fact, the practical point of view is that to 
which all his tendencies lead him. Moral philosophy is, in his 
eyes, the lawgiver of the human mind, the regulatrix of its econ- 
omy; she prepares the place, and arranges for the admittance of 
the other sciences, which could not exist without her; in the 
same way that legal justice, the ruler of cities, protects in them 
the cultivation of the useful arts. And, as it is in ethics that 
the excellence of philosophy is shown, it is, also, from ethics that 


the beauty of philosophy results; for beauty is harmony, and the 





1 Convito, ii., 14.—Cf. St. Bernard, Serm. ii., in Pentecost. 
2 Inferno, xxvii., 41. L. 
os) a) hota oPeradventure 
Thou djdst not think that I was a logician!” 
3 Convito, ii., 15. 


142 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


< 


most complete harmony found here below is that of the virtues. 
From the pleasure experienced in knowing them, results the de- 
sire of practicing them; and this desire restrains the passions, 
breaks up vicious habits, and gives rise to interior happiness, 
which always accompanies the legitimate exercise of the activity 
of the soul!’ Hence the humble and courageous dispositions of 
the real sage; hence the docility and simplicity that he will ask 
from his disciple, the abhorrence of every stain, and the struggle 
with self-indulgence of which he will expose the secret corrup- 
tion.2 Hence, moral truths are considered as the noblest inherit- 
ance bequeathed to the world by those who, through the exercise 
of reasoning have descended to the depths of things. Hence 
also the maxim that certain ideas are not to be reached by genius 
until it has passed through the flames of love.* 
IV. 

Such ideas regarding the starting point and the end of philoso- 
phy must have had their influence on the choice of amethod. If, 
in the legislation of the intelligence, the initiative belongs to God ; 
if Ile acts through grace, and His first work in us is faith; it is 
not in an artificial, systematic doubt that reason will find the con- 


dition of its progress. All truths have been implicitly given to it 





1 Convito, ifi., 15. 

2 Inferno, ii., 15. Purgatorio, i., 32; ii, 10; xix., 10. 

3 Purgatorio, xviii., 28. 

4 Paradiso, vii., 20.—Cf. St. Bernard, Sermo de Deo diligendo. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 143 


by the way of superior instruction; it has only to disengage them 
from confusion, error, and uncertainty ; it has not to seek, it has 
to verify and to state; it does not propose to itself problems to be 
solved, but theorems to be demonstrated ; its conclusions are rem- 
iniscences: it proceeds by synthesis. On the other hand, if the 
genius of the poet disregards the attractions of a merely technical 
logic, if he passes without effort from the study of the superna- 
tural world to that of nature, and from the study of nature to that 
of humanity, it is because these divers orders of ideas appear to 
him correlative. Man, in particular, is truly for him a microcosm, 
a summary of the creation, and an image of the Creator; each 
moment of his life is the result of his past days and the fore- 
shadowing of his future existence. henceforth, al! science 
seems only a series of bold equations and rapid deductions ; all is 
explained by way of juxtaposition, of comparison; beings are con- 
sidered in their living and conerete reality, and abstraction shows 
itself only at lone intervals. Nowy, since practical utility is the 
end of all his investigations ; since there is haste, impatience, to 
enter mto action; since study itself is presented as a moral obli- 
cation, and science as a duty, we cannot be surprised if all the 
knowledge attained come to be classed under the notion of good 
and evil. There will be a body of doctrines which will comprise, 
first, evil alone; then evil struggling with, or in relation to, good ; 


and finally, good itself, in man, in society, in the life to come, in 


144 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


the exterior beings to whose influences human nature is subjected. 
The invisible world will be taken for the main field of these ex- 
plorations, since there only do the problems of the visible world 
find their ultimate solution; there are contemplated face to fuce 
the substances and the causes admitted here below on the faith 
of their phenomena and their effects. Thus the learned concep- 
tions of the reason will enter spontaneously into the poetic frame 
afforded by religious tradition: Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.' 
Such a method might seem at first sight to present the appear- 
ance of a paralogism: for, if it makes of intellectual labor a pre- 
cept, whence can result the proof of such a precept, if not from 
the labor itself? It rises, and again descends through the series 
of beings; it concludes from time to eternity, as from the depths 
of eternity it perceives the things of time. Itaccepts a priori the 
dogma of the future life, it makes it the pivotal point of this en- 
tire study whence it would seem as if it ought to be deduced a 
posterior?. There is thena circle at the foundation of Dante’s 
thought; but it is not a vicious circle; there is a similar circle at 
the base of every origin: at that of certitude in logic, at that of 
moral duty, of powers and rights in matters political, of the word 
in literature; because, at every origin we encounter Him who is 
the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, the circle of which 


the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere. 





1 Gravina, Ragion poetica, lib. ii. 1, 13. 


CHAPTERII. 
EVIL. 


tT the moment of entrance into the realm of evil, the soul 

is filled with dread; it hesitates in the presence of its 

own weakness. It comprehends all that there is of 
sorrowful or of terrible in thus being initiated into the mysteries 
of human depravity, and that this experience is at once a privilege 
and a trial, reserved to those marked out for the fulfilment of 
some lofty and uncommon destiny.'! It would even stop in the 
way, were it not for two reflections which lend it aid, the first 
causing it to realize the impossibility of issuing from its own 
aberrations except by this means, and the second, to remember the 
divine assistance assured to the execution of a divinely inspired 
undertaking.? It is for those who, already dead to truth and jus- 
tice, enter upon the knowledge of evil, and descend into its 
abysses, impelled by a culpable avidity; it is for such alone that 


————_. 


1 Inferno, ii. 4. 
2 Inferno, i. 38; Purgatorio, i. 21; xxx. 46.—Cf. Virgil; £neid, 


vi. 180. 
145 


146 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the writing stands inscribed in sombre characters upon the gate: 
‘“ All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” ? 

Eyil is not simply the absence of good, it is the deprivation of 
good. Good is perfection, Alsolute perfection is being, carried 
to its highest power—that is, God. God calls His creatures to 
draw near to Him according to the divers proportions of power, 
according even to the diversity of the powers, with which. He has 
endowed them: this is the measure of their relative perfection. 
Their resistance to this divine call, their turning away from their 
proper tendency, is that which constitutes their perversity. This 
fact, easily recognizable in the individual man, is exhibited on a 
larger scale in the history of nations or societies, increases in its 
proportions when it is reproduced outside of the conditions of 
terrestrial life, and reaches its acme in beings more than 


human. 


Evi IN INDIVIDUAL MAN IN THIS WORLD. 


1. As truth is the supreme good of the intellect,? ignorance and 
error constitute intellectual evil. Ignorance and error vary ac- 
cording to their causes; of such causes, some are within man, and 
others are external to him. The first class is divided into four 


categories. There are first, bodily defects of which we must dis- 





1 Inferno, iii. 3. 2 Inferno, iii. 6. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 147 


tinguish two kinds: disorders of the organism derived from the 
mysterious sources of generation, and deveriorations of the brain 
occasioned by accidental causes. From these proceed dumbness 
and deafness, phrensy and alienation of mind.?| Then come the 
native and universal infirmities of the soul: weakness of the 
senses, feebleness of the reason. If the testimony of the eye or 
of the ear, on sensible qualities which pertain to their sphere, 
rarely deceives, the multiple sensations which are awakened bya 
single object, and which must be embraced together, are not al- 
ways rightly combined.? Besides, the sphere of the senses is 
restricted, and if reason shuts herself up within the limits of 
that sphere, she makes to herself very short wings. Even 
when she is ableto take her whole flight, she reaches bound- 
aries which she is forbidden to overpass: at the end of her 
laborions route, she sees opening before her the infinite way of the 
mysteries, which rise higherand higher, until they reach the very 


topmost heights of heaven.’ There are other species of infirmity, 





1 Convito, i. 1; iv. 15. 
* Convito, iv. 8; Purgatorio, xxix. 16. The common object which the 
sense deceives. Cf. Aristot. De Anima, ii. 6. 
8 Paradiso, ii. 19. L. Purgatorio, xxxiii. 30. L. 
* * * * For as much as following the senses, 
Thou seest that the reason has short wings: 


* * * * Behold your path from the divine 


148 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


less general, but more serious, because they are voluntary ; vain- 
glory, pusillanimity, and levity. Vain-glory makes many rely up- 
on their own strength until they go so far as to take their indiyid- 
ual conceptions for the measure of all things; they disdain to 
learn. to listen, to ask questions; they dream without sleeping, 
and go along philosophizing by rash ways which each one makes 
according to hisown will, isolating himself that he may be the 
more conspicuous.’ Pusillanimity causes many to fancy science 
to be above the reach of man; incapable of seeking it for them- 
selves, careless of the researches of others, obstinate in their inertia, 
like certain timid animals, they remain in the blindness of a gross 
way of life because they have despaired of truth.? Levity car- 
ries away the too lively minds who always go beyond the bounds 
of logic, who conclude before they have reasoned, fly from one 


conclusion to another, deny or affirm without distinguishing, and 





Distant as far as separated is 
From earth the heaven that highest hastens on. 
1 Convito, iv. 15.—Cf. Hugh of St Victor, Hruditionis didascalicae, 
lib. v. 9. Paradiso, xxix. 27. L. 
So that below, not sleeping, people dream * * * 
Below you do not journey by one path 
Philosopbizing ; so trausporteth you 
Love of appearance and the thought thereof. 
Cf. St. Thomas, Contra Gent., 1. 5. 


“ Convito, iv.15. Inferno, ii. 15. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 149 


fancy thay are subtile because they aresuperticial.! Finally, if 
we choose to penetrate to the innermost recesses of human cor- 
ruption, we meet with the vices of the heart, the foes of all good ~ 
thoughts; we perceive shameful pleasures fascinate the soul to the 
point of making it hold for naught everything except themselves : 
the intelligence is seen a captive held in chains by the sensibilities 
in revolt.? 

The second class, comprising such impediments as are external 
to man, may also be divided into two distinct categories, First to 
be noted are the necessities of domestic and civil life, the diffi- 
culties of times and places, the absence of means for study, of ad- 
vice and good examples, the influence of common opinions.* 
But beyond these circumstances, material so to speak, and easily 
recognized, which prevent our attaining to truth, other foes are 
hidden, perfidious and unreachable; spirits jealous of a science 
which they have lost, desirous of making others share in the dark- 


ness which has become their appanage. The action of such ex- 





1 Convito, iv. 15. Paradiso, xiii. 39. L. 
For very low among the fools is he 
Who affirms without distinction, or denies, 
2 Convito, i. 1. —Cf.St. Bonaventura, Compendium theologiae. ili. 5. 
St. Thomas, prima secunda, q. 85, art. 3. 
3 Convito, i. 1; iv. 8. Paradiso, xiii. 40. L. 
* * * * Tt happens that ful) often bends 


Current opinion in a false direction, 


150 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ternal and malevolent powers alone explains those involuntary, 
unavoidable facts, which exercise so baleful an influence, and which 
we calltemptations. Temptation, in the logical order, takes on two 
forms. It calls up in the way of our researches phantoms which 
seem to block our progress, fears, unreasonable melancholy, a pain- 
fuldiscouragement, which, driving us back from our onward course, 
would make us re-enter into the shameful night of ignorance. Or, 
if it cannot destroy in us the desire of knowing, it seeks to lead it 
astray by lying appearances, it lures us in a direction the term of 
which is error. 

Now the end of these divers maladies of the understanding is 
death, for life is that mode of being proper to living creatures ; 
vegetative in plants, sensitive in animals, in man essentially ra- 
tional. And as things borrow their names from that which is es- 
sential to their being, to live, for man, is to reason; and to de- 


part from the legitimate use of his reason is to die. If any one 


1 Inferno, viii. 28; xxiii. 47. In canto ix. (terz. 18), the Furies threat- 





en Dante with the appearance of Medusa; and he himself alludes to the 
allegorical interpretation which he attaches to this myth (terz. 21). Gia- 
copo di Dante, in his unpublished commentary, completes his father’s 
thought by explaining the three Gorgons to signify three sorts of fear, of 
which the last and most terrible, represented by Medusa, petrifies in some 
way the faculties of the soul, and sometimes strikes them with an eternal 
immobility. This passage offers an undeniable reminiscence of the Odys- 


sey, lib. xi. line 633. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 151 


should say: How can we call him dead whom we yet see acting ? 
the reply must be, that he is dead, as a man, but the animal still 
remains alive.’ 

2. The perfection of the will consists in virtue. Moral eyil 
then is vice: yice is any disposition of our will contrary to the 
divine will. 

There are three dispositions which Heaven does not allow : in- 
continence, malice, and bestiality.2. .Under the name of incon- 
tinence dre included lust and gluttony, which subject the reason 
to the appetites of the flesh; avarice and prodigality, both the re- 
sult of an unregulated use of temporal goods; anger and that cul- 
pable melancholy which enervates the soul and-keeps it in a state 
of slothful inaction. Malice is more odious; the end which it 
proposes to itself is injustice, the means it employs are violence 
and fraud. We may exercise violence towards three sorts of per- 
sons, God, ourselves, and our neighbor; and in two ways, accord- 


1 Convito, iv. 7.—lbid. ii. 8... 
2 Inferno, xi. 27. L. 
Hast thou no recollection of those words 
With which thine Ethics thoroughly discusses 
The dispositions three that Heaven abides not,— 
Incontinence, and Malice, and insane 
Bestiality 2 * * * ee 


Of. Aristot. Ethies, Book vii. Chap. i. 


152 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ing as we attack them in their existence or in the things which 
belong to them.'! The violence which attacks one’s neighbor may 
hence be murder or robbery ; that which one turns against oneself 
has its outcome in suicide or in dissipation; and that which is 
aimed at the Divinity is exhibited either by blasphemy, which is 
a moral deicide, by lubricious actions outraging nature, or by 
usury, which implies contempt for industry, the child of nature, 
as nature is the child of God.? 

Fraud, which is still more criminal, can be employed against 
those with whom one is united only by the general bond of hu- 
manity, or against those whose confidence is due to the closer 


bonds of relationship, nationality, benefaction, or legal subor- 





1 Inferno, xi. 8. L. 
Of every malice that wins hate in Heaven, 
Injury is the end; and all such end 
Either by force or fraud afflicteth others. * * * 
To God, to ourselves, and to our neighbor can we 
Use force ; I say on them and on their things. 
Cf. Cicero, de Officiis, i. 12.—St. Bonaventura, Compendium, fii. 6. 
° Inferno, xi. 33. L. 
Philosophy, he said, to him who heeds it, 
Noteth, not only in one place alone, 
After what manner nature takes her course 
From intellect Divine, and from its art; etc. 


Cf. Aristot. Physics, 1. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 153 


dination: in the latter condition, fraud, having reached its most 
odious degree, is called treachery or treason, We have seen 
man, by abdicating his reason, descend to the level of the 
brutes. Now is not a renunciation of empire over oneself, 
and the consequent succumbing to the slavery of the pas- 
sions, equivalent to such an abdication? As then, beyond the 
ordinary limitations of human nature, there is a lofty point where 
virtue becomes heroism, so is there also a point of degradation 
at which vice becomes brutishness. Such is the meaning of the 
fable of Circe, so celebrated in antique poetry. But the enchant- 
ress, although no longer visible, has not ceased to exist, or at 
least, her magical transformations have not ceased to be accom- 
plished under other aspects. Beneath exteriors which would seem 
to hold a thinking soul, are developed the low and groveling in- 
stincts of brute nature; we need not penetrate very far into the 
manners and customs of the various peoples to recognize these 
hideous types—the filthy habits of the hog, the snappish humor 


of the dog, the cunning of the fox.1. If we go back from the ef- 





1 Purgatorio, xiv. 14. L. 
On which account have so transformed their nature 
The dwellers in that miserable valley, 
It seems that Circe had them in her pasture. 
Cf. Cicero, de Officiis, i. 12.—Especially Boethius, de Consolatione, lib. 
iv. pros. 3.—Richard of St. Victor, de Eruditione interioris hominis, lib. 
iii. cap. ii. 


154 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


fects of vice to its causes, we meet with another and perhaps 
more scieutific division. Love, the necessary principle of all ac- 
tivity, can err as to its object by straying toward evil; it can also 
err in the excess or in the insufficiency of its energy, even while 
continuing to be directed towards good. Now, as love cannot 
cease to tend toward the welfare of the being in which it dwells, 
no one can hate himself; and as we can conceive of no being en- 
tirely detached from the eternal essence whence everything ema- 
nates, a feeling of hatred toward God is also happily an impossi- 
bility. There remains then no other evil to be loved except evil 
to our neighbor, and this corrupt love may be fashioned in the 
clay of the heart in three different ways. At one time it is the 
hope of his own elevation which makes a man desire the abase- 
ment of a neighbor; again, it is the fear of losing power, honor, 
or renown, which makes him grieve over the success of another ; 
or still again, it is a wound left in his soul by some unmerited 
offence. Pride, envy, anger; these are the three modes of the 
love of evil. Love feels confusedly the existence of some real 
good, in which it would find rest; it seeks to attain it; if the ef- 
fort be insufficient, sloth is the proper name of the resultant dis- 
position. Finally, there are other apparent goods which do not 
yield true happiness : riches, sensual delights, pleasures that bring 
a blush to the countenance: the love which gives itself up, with- 


out reserve, to these eujoyments, becomes criminal, and we know 


In the Thirteenth Century. 155 


it as avarice, gluttony, and lust. Now, as these seven capital sins 
descend from one and the same origin, so in like manner are the 


crowd of lesser vices related to them by a direful genealogy. 1 





1 Purgatorio, xvii. 82; Cary’s Tr. 

“Creator, nor created being, e’er, 

My son,” he thus began, ** was without love, 

Or natural, or the free spirit’s growth. 

Thou hast not that to learn. The natural still 

Is without error: but the other swerves, 

If on ill object bent, or through excess 

Of vigor, or defect.” * e * * 

“The evil must be another’s, which is loved.” 

“Three ways such love is gendered in your clay.” 

* All indistinctly apprehend a bliss 

On which the soul may rest ;”’ * * * 
If ye behold 

Or seek it with a love remiss and tax, 

This cornice, after just repenting, lays 

Its penal torment on ye. Other good 

There is, where man finds not his happiness :” 

“The love too lavishly bestowed on this, 

Along three circles over us, is mourned.” 

This classification of the capital sins, different from the one generally 
received, and also from that of St. Thomas, prima secundee, q. 84, a. 7, is 
found in St. Bonaventura, Compendium, iii. 14.—Hugh of St. Victor, 
Allegorie in Matthceeum, 3, 4, 5.—St. Gregory, Moralium, xxxi. 31; and 


with some slight differences, Cassian, de Institut. cenob., lib. y. cap. i. 


156 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


But, although nothing is more free than love, its first move- 
ment does not depend upon itself. This movement, when it is 
evil, is called concupiscence, and of this we may distinguish three 
kinds: the concupiscence of the senses, which is luxury; the 
concupiscence of the mind, which is ambition; and the last 
species, cupidity, which has something of the other two, in so 
much as it has for its object the means of satisfying them. 
These are the three menacing monsters which a man meets as he 
goes deep into the forest of life. Voluptuousness, under the 
semblance of a flexile and wanton panther, never ceasing to 
fascinate the gaze that she has once captivated; ambition, com- 
parable to the proud lion; and cupidity, like a wolf, whose leanness 
betrays its insatiable desires ; this last counts the largest number of 
victims. But these formidable beasts did not originate in the 
world which we find them ravaging; they are the children of 
hell, and envy opened for them the nether gates; ' or rather, to 


speak more exactly, concupiscence is anothor of those facts, im- 





1 Inferno, i., 11, 15, 17, 82, 37. L. 
And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings 
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness, 
And many folk has caused to live forlorn. 
23 ss = * Back to Hell, 
There from whence envy first did let her luose. 


See also Purgatorio, xx.. 4. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 157 


personal, universal, and continual, whose presence bespeaks the in- 
fluence of some external power. This power is unequally exer- 
cised, at first as a simple inspiration, against which resistance is 
easy ; then as an over-ruling possession, when the will has been 
surrendered to it. And when the will has permitted itself to be 
led to the lowest abysses of vice, it seems in some sort to perish 
therein; the moral life expires before the physical life has reached 
its final hour; we may say that the soul is already buried in the 
infernal prison to which it has condemned itself. The body in 
which it dwells is thenceforth as if possessed by another spirit, 
another life, another will, each and all Satanic. This is not sim- 
ply death, it is an anticipated damnation; in the place of the man 
who has departed, it is no longer a brute that remains, it is a 


demon." 





! Purgatorio, xiv., 49. L. 
aoe Fe eS THO OOk 
Of the old adversary draws you to him. 


Inferno, xxvii., 39. xxxiii., 43. L. 


* * * * As soon as any soul betrays 
As I have done, his body by a demon 
Is taken from him, who thereafter rules it, 
Until his time has wholly been revolved. 
Cf. St. Thomas, p. sect., q. 114, a. 1.—St. Bonaventura, Serm., in feri- 


ami v., Pentecostes. 


158 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


II. 
EVIL IN SOCIETY. 

The multiplication of the individual in space, forms society, and 
the evolution of society in time, is the subject of history. The 
same facts which have just been studied in the heart of the hu- 
man personage, ought then to be found on the stage of history, 
but with vastly enlarged proportions. The evil of the intelligence 
and that of the will, error and vice, are there again brought forth. 
the one in philosophical and religions teachings, and the other in 
the temporal and spiritual government of the nations. 

1. The aberrations of the human race begin in its very cradle, 
in the confusion introduced within his own being by the sin of 
our first father. Deprived of the happiness of conversing here 
below, face to face, with his creator, man sought to find the divin- 
ity in the stars of the firmament, of which he admired the bright- 
ness and felt the influenee.. This is why the names of Jupiter 
and Mercury, Mars and Venus, were hailed with vows and sacri- 
tices. This was a potent factor in the rise of idolatry, the first 


error of the first peoples.’ In time, the need of the truth not 





1 Paradiso, iv., 21; viii., 1. L. 
The world used in its peril to believe 
That the fair Cypria delirious love 
Rayed out in the third epicycle turning ; 
Wherefore not only unto her paid honor 
Of sacrifices and of votive ery 
The ancient nations in the ancient error, 
But both Dione honored they and Cupid. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 159 


possessed seized upon sundry noble intelligences. After the seven 
illustrious Greeks who received the title of Wise Men, another 
sage arose, Pythagoras, who, more deeply penetrated by the feel- 
ing of human infirmity, desired to be known as a Friend to Wis- 
dom. Schools are formed, and philosophy is born.1 These efforts 
do not remain without result, but they are powerless in regard 
to the very questions the response to which is of the uttermost 
importance. The sovereign reason will not fully reveal itself until 
the coming of the Son of Mary.? God, misknown by the major- 
ity, does not receive from those who have some proper knowledge 
of Him, the homage which is His due.* While this general dim- 
ness envelopes all the schools, several are surrounded by obscur- 
ities peculiar to themselves. It would require along time to 
enumerate all their aberrations: from Parmenides and the pre- 
sumptuous Eleatices, who plunge into the depths of reasoning 


without knowing whither they are going, down to Epicurus and 





1 Convito, iii., 11. 
2 Purgatorio, iii., 13. L. 
Mortals, remain contented at the Quia; 
For if ye had been able to see all, 
No need there were for Mary to give birth ; 
And ye have seen desiring without fruit, 
Those whose desire would have been quieted, 
Which evermore is given them for a grief. 
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato, 
And many others. " * * 


9 Inferno, iv., 138, 43; Purgatorio, viii., 9. 


160 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


lis followers, who make the spirit perish with the body; * from 
Pythagoras, who makes souls descend through all the grades of 
creation, to Plato, who sees them remonnt to the stars whence 
they emanated.” The modern world is not willing to leave to the 
antique world the sad privilege of believing and teaching false- 
hood: false doctrines find theological expression in heresy, and 
philosophical expression in numerous systems. Great citizens 
of the Christian republics, sovereigns of the Holy Empire, and 
even cardinals who serve them as counsellors, have professed im- 
pious doctrines.* The multitude, ignorant and sordid as it is, 
deserting the arts known as liberal, because service to such arts 
must be disinterested, hastens to the lessons of the decretalists, or 


follows in the train of physicians who point the way to fortune. * 





— —_ 


1 Inferno, x., 5. 
With Epicurus all his followers, 
Who with the body mortal make the soul, 
Ibid, xii., 14; Paradiso, xiii., 42. 
Parmendes, Melissus, Brissus are, 
And many who went on and knew not whither. 
2 Convito, iv., 21; Paradiso, iv., 8. 
Again for doubting furnish thee occasion 
Souls seeming to return unto the stars 
According to the sentiment of Plato. 
3 Inferno, xX., 11, 40. 


4 Convito, iii., 11; Paradiso, ix., 1, 5; xi., 2; xii., 28. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 101 


The Scriptures and the Fathers remain buried in the dust. Fables 
and rash speculations find their way even into the pulpit, and ask 
as their reward the stupid wonderment or sacrilegious laughter 
of an audience worthy of them. } 

2. But, afflicting as the errors touching the rationality of the 
public may be to the poet-philosopher, he at least finds a sort of 
consolation in being able to point out the fragility of our fallen 
nature as their cause: he reserves his chief mourning, and all his 
anger, to deplore the corruption of morals, of which he recognizes 
the origin in the corruption of the laws and of the powers behind 
the Jaws. He sees the shepherds of the people lead their flocks to 
gross pastures where they forget the justice for which they had 
hungered.? He enumerates the small number of good kings, the 
tumults in cities ruled by the people, the intestine strife, and the 
blood poured forth. * And, as if his words were defied and van- 
quished by these direful spectacles, he borrows the language used 
by the prophets of the Old and New Testaments. The govern- 
ment of the nations, considered in its successive changes, may be 
compared to the vision of Daniel. It is figured by the gigantic 
statue of an old man, with a head of gold, chest and arms of sil- 
ver, a trunk of copper, legs of iron, and feet of clay. Standing in 


a hollow of Mt. Ida, he turns his back on Egypt, and looks toward 


1 Paradiso, xxix., 28. 2 Purgatorio, xvi., 34. 


® Inferno, xii., 36, 


162 _ Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Rome. Each one of the parts of which he is composed, except his 
head, is furrowed by a gash, whence tears distil; these streams of 
tears, uniting, find a passageway down from the cavern, and give 
rise in the interior of the earth to the four rivers of the infernal 
regions. The statue is monarchy, such as bad princes have made 
it. Egyptis the figure of the institutions of the past; Rome is 
the type of later times. The succession of the metals repre- 
sents that of empires, of political forms, of the ages which have 
become more and more degenerate. The wounds of the social 
body are truly the sources of the flood of crimes and woes of 
which the overflow is to aid in filling hell. ! 
Se eee 
1 Inferno, xiv., 31. 
In the mid-sea there sits a wasted land... 
A grand old man stands in the mount erect, 
Who holds bis shoulders turned tow’rds Damietta, 
And looks at Rome as if it were his mirror. 
His head is fashioned of refined gold, etc. 

The interpretation here given of this allegory is that proposed by Costa 
in his commentary on the Divine Comedy. We have thought proper to ad- 
mit it, since we find the dream of Nabuchodonosor explained in an almost 
identical manner by Richard of St. Victor, de Erudit. int. hom. 1. i., cap. 
1. Our last remaining doubts were dispelled when we read in the manu- 
script commentary ascribed to Giacopo di Dante, the following gloss: ‘It 
is to be considered that this old man signifies and represents the entire em- 


pire and course of the world, the whole empire with the lives of the rulers 


In the Thirteenth Century. 163 


The religious decadence is presented under a no less sinister as- 
pect. The Roma court has become like to the woman seen by the 
prophetic Evangelist, seated by the waters, and dallying with 
kings. Formerly, the Pontiff, her lawful spouse, faithful tothe laws 
of virtue, was able to control the beast with the seven heads and 
the ten horns, that is, sin, which in our day is no longer restrained." 
Gold and silver are made into idols which do not lack priests. 
The apostolic keys have been changed into armorial bearings: they 
have been seen on the standards of men fighting against true be- 
lievers. War is carried on in our day by depriving Christian peo- 
ples of the spiritual bread which our Heavenly Father has pre- 
pared for all.2 However, let those who are afflicted by these 


scandals await the providential hour which is to end them. 





and princes from the beginning of the reign of Saturn down to our own 
times... The author purposes showing how the empire being among 
pagans and in the Orient, was transported among the Greeks. . . then was 
the empire transported from among the Greeks to the Romans ; and there- 
fore does the author say that this old man has his back turned toward 
Damietta, which is in the East, and looks at Rome, that is, toward the 
West.” 

1 Inferno, xix., 36. 

The Evangelist you pastors had in mind, ete. 

It is again from the commentator Costa that we borrow the explanation 

of this difficult passage.—Cf. Richard of St. Victor, sup. Apocalyps. 


2 Inferno, xix., 38; Paradiso, ix., 44; xviii., 41; xxvii., 16. 


104 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Schism rends asunder, and does not cure; and they prepare for 
themselves eternal remorse who profit by the dark nights of the 
Church to sow tares in her field.’ But the depravation of the 
two powers, ecclesiastical and temporal, is less perillous than their 
confusion. The cross and the sword have been united in the 
hands of the violent; mutual respect bas been lost in a forced 
conjunction.’ If order is the highest good of society, confusion, 


disorder, is for it the lowest expression of evil. 


TI. 
Evit In Lost SouLs IN THE OTHER WORLD. 


Thus far, evil has revealed itself only in a manner doubly im- 
perfect, limited in man by liberty, which never entirely perishes, 
and in society by the protestations, always to be heard, of the 
public conscience. Now we must behold it freed from the ob- 
stacles opposed to it by the possible return to, and the simultane- 
ous presence of, good; we must see it in a condition of isolation, 
of immutability. The city of the wicked, invisible in this world 
where it is confounded with the city of God, is to become visible 
in the world of the dead. 


1. Popular tradition, inspired perhaps by voleanic phenomena, 











1 Inferno, xxviii., 12. See for explanations more complete, and correc 
tive of the bitterness of the preceding reproaches, Part III., Chap. V. 


2 Purgatorio, xvi., 37. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 165 


placed hell in the interior of the terrestrial globe. The science of 
antiquity represented that situation as the lowest in the universe, 
and the farthest removed from the Empyrean: it was natural to 
banish to such a place the souls cut off by sin from the abode of 
the Divinity.1 Hell still retains some marks of the divine omni- 
presence. Power, Wisdom, and Love prepared it from of old; 
even Loye, for it is just that eternal sorrow should be the lot of 
those who have despised eternal love! * 

If hell is the accomplishing of the work of reprobation, the out- 
line of which has already been traced upon the earth, the princi- 
pal features ought to be the same, and the same divisions be suit- 
able to both. The condemned in the other world will then range 
themselves in the same categories as do sinners in this. The 


abyss is hollowed out by nine circles, which become narrower as 





1 Inferno, passim. This opinion was also that of the Middle Ages.—Cf. 
Hugh of St. Victor, Erudit. didascal., 1,3.—St. Bonaventura, Compen- 
dium Theologic, viii., 21. 

2 Inferno, iii., 2; Cary’s Tr. 

Justice the founder of my fabric moved: 
To rear me was the task of power divine, 
Supremest wisdom, and primeyal love. 

Ibid., 42, Paradiso, xvy., 4. 

He hath in sooth good cause for endless grief 
Who, for the love of thing that lasteth not, 
Despoils himself forever of that love. 


106 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


they lie deeper. The first receives within its wide circumference 
men who were never really living, souls that passed away without 
infamy, and without glory, neutral between God and His enemies, 
ever acting solely for themselves. Beneath these appears the throng 
who, outside of Christianity, led good lives, but were lacking either 
in knowledge of the truth or in courage toserve it. The absence 
of an infinite bliss which they constantly desire without the hope 
of attaining, throws a veil of sadness over their destiny, which, 
in other respects, is neither without consolation nor without 
honor. The four circles that follow contain the victims of ineon- 
tinence; on the confines between incontinence and malice, is 
chastised heresy, which partakes of both. The seventh circle, 
subdivided into three zones, contains the violent. The eighth is 
furrowed by ten wide ditches wherein fraud is punished. In the 
ninth, groan the traitors.! 

2. It is within these bounds that is to be set forth the sol- 
emn exhibition of suffering, physical, intellectual, and moral. 
Suffering, the progeny of sin, keeps its primitive character, and 
remains an evil when it is not expiatory. But physical suffering 
supposes the existence of the senses, which seem inconceivable 
if separated from their organs. Hence, until the general resur- 


rection shall have restored to the reprobate the flesh in which 





1 Inferno, passim ; but especially xi., 6. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 167 


they grew corrupt, provisional bodies are given to them: shad- 
ows, when compared with the living members they have replaced, 
and yet visible realities; not displacing the foreign objects that 
they encounter, yet hiding from sight those before which they 
ure interposed; vanities in themselves, but capable of feeling tor- 
ture. They sometimes lose the human form, to assume more sin- 
ister Shapes; they crawl as serpents, throw out branches from 
beneath a delusive covering of bark, or flicker in whirling eddies 
of flame.* Thus, all that nature holds of most terrible, the most 
frightful horrors that the human imagination has been able to in- 
vent, all that divine retribution has reserved to itself in the way 


of unutterable severities, are conjoined in chastisements, each 





1 Inferno, vi., 6, 12; xvii., 29, 33; xii., 27; xix., 15, 43; xxiii., 13; 
xXiv., 8; xxxii., 27, etc. 
He rends the spirits, flays, and quarters them. . . 
* * * We placed our feet 
Upon their vanity that person seems. . . 
Within his arms encircled and sustained me. 
* * * Walking ’mong the heads 
I struck my foot hard in the face of one... 
He said to his companions: are you ware 
That he behind moveth whate’er he touches? 
Thus are not wont to do the feet of dead men. 
St. Augustine (de Civit Dei xxi., 10) seems to express a doubt on the 


point of knowing whether the damned haye bodies. 


168 Dante, and Catholic Phitosophy 


one of which, a hellish symbol, represents the vice to which it 
corresponds. 

These sufferings will again increase when the opened graves 
shall have restored the dead to a life that will have no end. For, 
the more complete a being is, the more completely are its func- 
tions fulfilled: the closer the union of the soul with the body, the 
more intense must be the resulting sensibility.2 And now, how 
shall the punishment of intelligences be set forth? Memory of 
the past remains; but the memory of crime, without repentance, 
is only an additional woe.2 The present is not known to them, 
although the future is open to their view--like to the case of 
some aged persons whose enfeebled vision can perceive objects 
a great way off, but fails to distinguish them as they come nearer. 
But this prophetic illumination, the only ray from the eternal 
light which falls upon them, will be eclipsed, when, time having 
come to an end, the gates of the future shall be closed. Then, 


in them, all knowledge will be extinct. Even the ideas which, 





1 Inferno, vi., 40. 
* * * Return unto thy science, 
Which wills, that as a thing more perfect is, 
The more it feels of pleasure and of pain. 


This maxim is borrowed from St. Augustine, who got it from Aristotle. 


? Inferno, x, 16, 26, ete.—-Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Theol. p. 1. q. 89, art 6. 


3 Inferno, Vi., 22 ; xv., 21; xxvili., 26; x., 33. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 169 


for the time being, still subsist, are din aid confused, are not in 
the state of science, much less in that of philosophy; for phil- 
osophy is compounded of knowledge and of love, and in that place, 
all love dies. The infernal spirits are then deprived of the con- 
templation of that beautiful object which is the beatitude of the 
understanding, and the deprivation of which is full of bitterness 
and sorrow. 3 

The absence of love is the uttermost punishment of wicked 
wills. Thence the mutual hatred which makes them curse one 
another,? that hatred of themselves which spurs them on to throw 


themselves in the way of torments,’ and the hatred of the Divin- 





It seems that you can see, if I hear rightly, 
Beforehand whatsve’er time brings with it, 
And in the present have another mode. 
We see, like those who have imperfect sight, 
The things, he said, that distant are from us; 
So much still shines on us the Sovereign Ruler. 
Cf. St. Thomas, loc. cit., art. 8. 


1 Convito, ifi., 138. The intelligences exiled from their’supernal country 
cannot philosophize ; because love is deadin them, and to philosophize, 
love is necessary ; whence we see that they are deprived of the presence 
of this most beautiful one; since she is the beatitude of the intellect, to 
be deprived of her is most bitter and filled with every misery. 


2 Inferno, passim. 3 Inferno, iii., 40, 


170 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ity whom they are braving in the very midst of their punishments.’ 
Thence, the ceaseless blasphemy against the Creator, against the 
human race, against the time, the place, the authors of their 
birth, and that desire for annihilation which will never be 
granted. Their passions of this world have accompanied them: 
greedy as of yore for praise, pleasure, and vengeance, they never 
cease to merit the chastisements which they never cease to suffer, ? 
and these sufferings which by their endless duration are akin to 
infinity, are also related to it by their intensity, since they all pro- 


ceed from the loss of the sovereign good, which is God. 


IV. 


THE DEMONS. 


We have recognized in the errors and transgressions of life the 
origin of the chastisements which follow death. Evil has shown 
itself us in turn cause and effect, under its voluntary, and under 
its penal form. Outside of this alternation of death and life, 
there are beings in whom are more closely united the cause and 
the effect, the evil disposition and its punishment, beings who in- 
fluence guilty humanity, who preceded it in guilt; instigators to 


1 Inferno, xiv., 18; xxv., 1. 
2 Inferno, v., 26; xxxi., 26.—Cf. St. Thomas, 28, 2ac, q. 15. art. 3. 


Summa contra gentes, xv., 92-95. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 171 


the sins of men in this world, and executors of his punishment in 
the next, finished types of perversity : such are the demons. 

It would seem as if in falling from the heights of the spiritual 
world, where they stood in the first rank, these fallen angels have 
undergone the humiliation of a material transformation, and that 
bodies have likewise been given to them. At the same time, an 
almost sovereign empire over nature is attributed to them.? 
Storms obey them, the waters and the lightnings gather at 
their beck;? they sometimes wreak their vengeance on the 
bodies of the dead, when the souls have escaped their power. 
With this supernatural intervention is connected the iniquitous 
pursuit of magic. But they exercise a still more constant and 
general influence over human destinies: temptation is their work. 
We have seen them lay snares along the perilous paths of 
science ; we have seen them open the gates of hell to the 
three species of concupiscence. Like to fishers who never 
weary, they hide under deceitful baits the hooks which catch 
wavering wills. They pursue their prey even beyond the tomb: 
they do not fear to dispute with the angels for its possession, and 


thus renew their combats of the olden time. * 








1 Inferno, passim. Especially xii., xvii., xxxi.—Cf. St. Augustine, de 
Civitate Dei, ix., cap. xxiii.; and Sup. Genesim. 
2 Purgatorio, v., 37.—Cf. St. Thomas, p. q. 110, art. 3. 


3 Inferno, xxvii., 38; Purgatorio, v., 36, 


172 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Their second office is the administration of punishments. They 
reign over lost souls in the infernal regions, each division of 
which is placed under the auspices of certain ones among their 
number. Thus, in the vestibule, amid the throng of egotists, 
are found the ungrateful angels who remained neutral during the 
revolt in the heavens.!. Thus also, by a reminiscence of pagan 
poetry which theology did not condemn, Charon, Minos, Cerber- 
us, Pluto, Phlegias, the Furies, the Centaurs, the Harpies, Ger- 
yon, Cacus, the Giants, all transformed into demons are estab- 
lished as guardians of the successive zones. Innumerable le- 
gions are scattered, either upon the ramparts of the dolorous city, 
or in its divers parts, and pursue their unhallowed sports amid 
the terrible spectacles therein presented.® But these legions are 
all slaves of one master. He was the first in rank, and once the 
most beautiful of spirits; now, he is the Evil Will, who seeks ill 
alone; he it is from whom all woes proceed, the ancient enemy 
of mankind.4 A wretched and lying parody of Divinity, the ruler 


of the realm of pain, he has his icy throne at a point which is at 





1 Inferno, iii., 13. 

2 Inferno, iii., v., vi., Viii., ix., xii., xiii., xvii, XxXV., XXX].. XXXiV.— 
Virgil 42neid., vi.—Cf. St. Thomas 21 2 p. 94, 

3 Inferno, viii., 28; xxi.—Cf. St. Thomas, la p, 63, art. 9. 


4 Inferno, xxxiv.. 6; Purgatorio, xiv., 49. 


Ln the Lhirteenth Century. 173 


once the centre and the bottom of the abyss: around him are 
graded the nine hierarchies of reprobation; on him rests the en- 


tire system of iniquity.1. Sin and suffering, which are for souls 
1 Inferno, xxxiv. L. 

The emperor of the kingdom dolorous 
From his mid-breast forth issued from the ice;.... 

Oh, what a marvel it appeared to me, 
When I beheld three faces on his head ! 
The one in front, and that vermilion was;.... 

And the right hand one seemed ’twixt white and yellow; 
The left was such to look upon as those 
Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward. 

In the bold portrait that Dante draws of Lucifer, we cannot help re- 
marking the three faces attributed to him, recalling the triple Hecate of 
ancient mythology. A still deeper intention seems to underlie the idea 
of the three colors given to this triple face, and contrasted to the three 
colors of the mystic circles Whereby later we shall find the Blessed Trinity 
represented. The commentary of Giacopo di Dante offers on this point a 
symbolic explanation which by reason of its originality seems worthy cf 
notice : *‘ These three faces signify the three impotences pertaining to Lu- 
cifer, whence all ills arise, and which are opposite to the three attributes 
possessed by God. The first attribute which God has is prudence, by 
which He foresees and co-ordinates all things : in contrast to this, Lucifer 
has ignorance, that is, he neither knows nor discerns anything; and this 
is signifled by the black face. The second attribute that God has, is love, 


which made Him make the world, and rule and sustain it: in contrast to 


174 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


what weight is for bodies, have forced him to the spot which is 
the very centre of the earth, toward which all heavy masses 
tend. The general gravitation envelops him, weighs upon him, 
presses him down on every side: his crime was to wish to draw 
al creatures to himself: his punishment is, to be crushed under 


the weight of ereation.! 





this, Lucifer has hatred and envy, by which he corrupts the world and 
promotes the doing of evil; this issignified by the red face. The third at- 
tribute of God is power, by which He rules all things, whether eternal or 
of this world, as is pleasing to Him, and as reason and justice require ; in 
contrast to this, Lucifer has weakness and powerlessness, that is, he can do 
nothing,....and this is signifled by the face ’twixt white and yellow.” 
1 Inferno, xxxiv., ete. 
And if I then became disquieted, 
Let stolid people think who do not see 
What the point is beyond which I had passed. 
Paradiso, xxix., 18. 
. -That one, Whom thou hast seen 
By all the burden of the world constrained. 


Cf, St. Bonaventura, compendium, ii., 23.—St. Thomas, 1a, q. 64, art. 4. 


CHAPTER III. 


EvIL AND GOOD, IN CONJUNCTION AND IN CONFLICT. 


Vit in all its deformity, and Good in allits purity, can display 


themselves thoroughly only at their origin andat theirterm, 





both these points being placed beyond the horizon of time. ButGood 
and Evil meet in time as in a free field, and there encounter one 
another, now sharply opposed, and again confounded together. 
We must examine into the circumstances and the effects of this 
encounter, whether in the vicissitudes of life, individual or social, 
in that continuation of life wherein efficacious expiations may be 
accomplished, or in nature, which is the theatre in which occur 
all temporal incidents, and which always, in some sort, bears the 
impress of their passage. 
1b 

1. We here find the proper place to make known the innermost 
constitution of man, the common subject of these various in- 
fluences (propitious or detrimental), the instrument alternately 


of Good or of Evil. We are not in this connection permitted 
175 


176 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


to recoil before any secret, whether of generation, of the union of 
the soul with the body, or of their separation. 

Three powers concur in the work of generation. First, the 
stars exercise the potency of their radiation upon matter, disen- 
gaging, under favoring conditions, from the combined elements, 
the vital principles which animate plants and animals. Then, 
there is in man a power of assimilation which is communicated to 
the digested elements, which power is distributed with the blood 
to all the members of the body, and bears fecundity with it, even 
externally. Finally, woman holds within herself a constitutional 
power which prepares the matter destined to receive the benefit 
of birth. The thirsty veins do not, in the work of nutrition, ab- 
sorb all the blood that is given to them. A portion of this ali- 
mentary fluid, purified, remains in the heart, and is there still’ 
more deeply impregnated with an assimilative energy; it passes 
off into channels wherein its elaboration is completed, then at the 
proper moment, the blood of the father, active and capable of or- 
ganizing, fecundates the passive and docile blood contained in the 
womb of the mother. There are fashioned the elements of the 
future body, until a sufficient preparation has enabled them to lend 
themselves to the celestial influence which produces life in them. 
This life, at first vegetable, but progressive, is developed by its own 
exercise; it causes the organism to pass from the state of plant 


to that of zoophyte. finally to reach complete animality. And here 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 177 


ends the action of the powers of nature: they are (to repeat) the 
mother who furnishes the matter, and the father who gives the 
form, the stars whence emanates the vital principle. To enable 
the creature to overpass the interval which separates animality 
from humanity, we must have recourse to Him who is the Primal 
Mover. As soon as the organism of the brain has reached its 
term, God casts a glance filled with love upon the great work 
which has just been accomplished, and touches it with a potent 
breath. The divine breath draws to itself the principle of activity 
which it encounters in the body of the child; of the two is made 
one substance, one soul, which lives, feels, and acts upon itself. } 

The soul is then single in its essence, for the exercise of one 
of its faculties in a certain degree of intensity suffices to absorb it 


? . . . . . 
entirely. ? In it, distinct among themselves, yet united and mu- 








! Convito, iv., 21.—This doctrine is further developed in the celebrated 
passage, Purgatorio, xxv., 13. Cf. Aristot. De Generat. Animal., ii., 3. St. 
Thomas, 1a, q. 119, art. 2.—St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 32. 

* Purgatorio, iv., 2. 

Whenever by delight or else by pain, 
That seizes any faculty of ours, 
Wholly to that the soul collects itself, 
It seemeth that no other power it heeds ; 
And this against that error is which thinks 
One soul above another kindles in us. 


Cf. St. Thomas, 14, q. 76, art. 3. The argument is literally the same. 


178 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tually implying one another, three powers exist, vegetative, ani- 
mal, rational; taken together, they may be compared to a pentagon, 
which is composed of superposed figures! The soul, present in 
the members, in all the atoms of living dust of which they are 
compounded, reveals itself in them by the very exercise of their 
functions. It is united to the body as cause is to effect, act to 
potentiality, form to matter.* We call it Substantial Form, because 
it alone constitutes a man thai which he is, and its departure causes 
this wonderful combination to lose its existence and its name. 
Jt has its seat in the blood ; 4 nevertheless it makes of the brain a 
species of treasury, wherein it deposits the images which it desires 
to retain. It has chosen the face whereby to make outward 
manifestation of itself: there it works; it fashions the flesh to 
render it transparent to the interior lights of thought; it moulds 


the features with infinite delicacy, creates the physiognomy, and 

1 Purgatorio, xxv., 26; Convito, ii., 8; iv., 7.—Cf. Aristot. de Anima, 
ii.,3: iii., 12. St. Thomas, 14, q. 78. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 
82. 

2 Inferno, xxvii., 25; Paradiso, ii., 45. 

While I was still the form of bone and pulp, etc. 

Conyvito, ili., 2.—Cf. Aristot., de Anima, ii., 1. —St. Thomas, la, q. 75, 1. 

* Purgatorio, xviii., 17. —Cf. St. Thomas, la, q. 76, 4. 

‘ Purgatorio, v., 26. 


* * * The blood wherein I had my seat. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 179 


puts forth its utmost efforts in adorning and embellishing the two 
features through which it more especially reveals itself—the eyes 
and the mouth. They may be called the two balconies whereon 
the queen that dwells within the human edifice often shows her- 
self, although veiled.’ Finally, the queen’s ministers are the 
spirits of the senses, vapors formed in the heart and distributed 
through all the members, subtile fluids which keep up the communi- 
cations between the cerebral organ and the organs of the senses.* 
But the queen may become a slave. There are certain constitu- 
tional defects which oppose themselves to the free development 
of the soul; there are gross and darkened natural dispositions in- 
to which the light from God penetrates with difficulty. ? The rey- 
olutions of the heavens, also those of the seasons, by means of 
the physical dispositions which they induce, exert an undeniable 
influence over the moral faculties. And, as to the four ages of 
human life correspond in the body four temperaments which re- 
sult from the combination of the watery, the hot, the dry, and the 


cold, so does the soul pass through four phases, of which each 





! Purgatorio, xxxiii., 27 ; Paradiso, i., 8.; Convito, iii., 8.—Cf. Brunetto 
Latini, Tresor, 1., i., cap. xv., and especially St. Bonaventura, Compen- 
dium, ii., 87-59, where may be found curious anticipations of Lavaterand 
of Gall. 

2 Convito, ii., 2,14; iii, 9. Vita Nuova, 3,6. Paradiso, xxvi., 24. 


3 Convito, iv., 20. 


180 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


one has its own distinct character, its charms, and its drawbacks, 
its more familiar vices, and its favorite virtues.? 

Death interrupts this harmony. But among all the brutal 
opinions current among men, the most insensate, the vilest, and 
most dangerous, is that which denies the existence of another 
life? It finds its condemnation in the teaching of the most il- 
lustrious schools, in that of all the poets of antiquity, of all the 
religions of the world, of every society which has lived subject to 
law ; in the hope of a future existence placed by nature in the 
depths of every soul, and which could not be deceptive without 
supposing an impossible contradiction in the heart of the most 
perfect work of creation; in the experience of dreams and visions 
wherein men have held intercourse with immortal beings; and 
finally, in the dogmas of the Christian faith, which faith furnishes 
us with the highest degree of certitude, because it emanates from 
Him who has bestowed upon us that very immortality. When 


then the soul is separated from the dying flesh, it bears with it 





1 Convito, iv., 2, 23-28. —Cf. Albert. Magn., Metaurorum, iv. —#gid. 
Columna, de Regimine princip. 1. i., part 1, cap. vi. 

2 Convito, ii. 9. I say that of all brutal opinions, that isthe most stupid, 
vile, and pernicious, which believes that after this life there is no other; 
because if we turn over the writings of philosophers, as well as of other 
wise writers, all agree that there is in us a part which is immortal, ete. . . 


This is also certified by the most true doctrine of Christ. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 181 


all the divine and all the human faculties which properly per- 
tain to it: the divine, as memory, intellect, and will, grown still 
more active; the human, ineluding all that may be ranged under 
the term sensibility, temporarily inert. The soul’s merit or its 
demerit, as an impelling force, determines the place of chastise- 
ment, of expiation, or of recompense, which it will occupy. As 
soon as it reaches the place assigned to it, it exercises around it- 
self, in the ambient air, the formative power with which it is en- 
dowed. And, as the humid atmosphere becomes colored by the 
rays that are reflected within it, so does the air take on the new 
form impressed upon it; thence results a subtile body, wherein 
each sense has its organ, each thought its exterior expression ; 
wherein the soul recovers the functions of its animal life, and re- 


veals its presence by words, smiles, or tears.’. This is what was 





1 Purgatorio, xxv. 27. L. 
It separates from the flesh, and virtually 
Bears with itself the human and divine; 
The other faculties are voiceless all ; 
The memory, the intelligence, and the will 
In action far more vigorous than before... 
Soon as the place there circumscribeth it, 
The virtue informative rays round about, 
As, and as much as, in the living members... 
So there the neighboring air doth shape itself 
Into that form which doth impress upon it 


182 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


meant by the ancients when they peopled the kingdom of death 
with shades ; and this is the opinion of several more recent philoso- 
phers who cannot conceive the possibility of sufferings and enjoy- 
ments without the possession of some corporeal envelop.’ But the 
shadow must one day pass away in presence of the reality, and 
these temporary bodies will give place to those which, reanimated 
arise from their tombs: for, if corruptibility is the common law of 
creatures, it is that of those only which are the product of the ac- 
tion of other created beings: thus perish things that are produced 
by the concurrence of the primal matter and the influence of the 
stars, but thus do not perish those that issue directly from the 


hands of the Creator. The Eternal does not communicate a life 





Virtually the soul that has stood still... 

Since afterwards it takes from this its semblance, 
It is called shade ; and thence it organizes 
Thereafter every sense, even to the sight. 

1 Conyito, ii. 9. I say corporea] and incorporeal, from the divers opin- 
ions that I find on this subject.—Cf. St. Augustine, Epist., 13, 159, 162, 
where he rejects this opinion as rash, but still allows of the doubt.—See 
also Origen and St. Irenzeus, cited by Brucker (Hist. crit. Phil., in Pla- 
tone), as having admitted the existence of a subtile body accompanying 
the soul after death. We find it again, with curious developments, in the 
fragments of the commentary of Proclus on the 10th book of Plato's Re- 
public, published by Cardinal Mai.—Auctores classici, 1. See also the 
Thesis on Proclus by M. Berger. 


In the Thirieenth Century. 183 


that can be exhausted; humanity is His work; humanity entire. 
soul and body, was formed by His hands, animated by His breath, 
on the sixth day of the creation of the world: on the last day, it 
will live again, whole and entire, body and soul.’ 

2. A detailed analysis will lead us farther into the knowledge 
of ourselves. 

Among intellectual phenomena, the first, which we may call 
elementary, are the sensations; and among these, the most com- 
plicated are those pertaining to the sense of vision. Objects do 
not really come in contact with the eye: it is their forms which 
are transmitted by a sort of impulsion through the diaphanous 
air; they are arrested in the liquid of the pupil, where they are 
reflected as if in a mirror. There, they are received by the spir- 
its employed in the service of the sight, which in their turn trans- 
mit and present them to the brain: and thus it is that we see. 
Every sensation is thus accomplished by a communication from 


the object to the brain, across a continuous medium or series of 


Se a es 
1 Paradiso, vii. 23-49. L. 


Whate’er from this immediately distils 
Has afterward no end, ete... . 
And thou from this mayst argue furthermore 
Your resurrection, if thou think again 
How human flesh was fashioned at that time 
When the first parents, both of them were made. 
Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, i. 1, 


184 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


media.! The lower portion of the cerebral viscus is the common 
source of sensibility. There dwells that common sense wherein 
all the impressions received by the organs are collected and com- 
pared. Yet, the predominance of one of these impressions effaces 
the others: the soul, when held by the charm of a spectacle en- 
chanting the eyes, takes no noie of the flight of time which the 
faithful clock announces to the ears.* Sensibility is in a manner 
prolonged by the assistance of the imagination. Nevertheless, 
the imagination, freed from the influences of the earth, may be 
enlightened by a celestial splendor, Often does it ravish us out 
of ourselves to such a degree that we may remain deaf to the 
sound of a thousand trumpets blaring beside us.* Finally, sen- 
sations primarily indicate only sensible qualities, and yet they 


make known certain dispositions in the object whence they em- 





1 Convito, iii., 9. A detaileddescription of the phenomenon of sensation. 
2 Purgatorio, iv., 3. L. 
And hence whenever aught is heard or seen 
Which keeps the soul intently bent upon it, 
Time passes on, and we perceive it not, ete. 
3 Purgatorio, xvii., 5. L. 
O thou, Imagination, that dost steal us 
So from without sometimes, that man perceives not, 
Although around may sound a thousand trumpets, 
Who moyeth thee, if sense impel thee not ? 


Moves thee a light, which in the heayen takes form. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. U85 


anate; they are accompanied by a feeling of usefulness or of peril. 
There is then a faculty which takes hold of them, disengages and 
seizes upon the relations implicitly perceived, and proposes. them 
to the operation of the understanding: we call it, thus restoring 
to its primitive valuea word long debased, Apprehension.’ Thus, 
the sensible fact is the necessary element of every intelligible no- 
tion. This initiative of the senses in the operations of the human 
mird, is one of the fatalities of our nature, the principal source of 
our weakness ; it is, at the same time, strange to say, the condi- 
tion of our rational perfectibility, and consequently of our great- 
ness.” 

Imagination and Apprehension mark two points of transition 
between passivity and activity. Above this first, lower region of 


the soul, disturbed by importunate and often deceptive appear- 








1 Purgatorio, xviii., 8. 
Your apprehension from some real thing 
An image draws, and in yourselves displays it 
So that it makes the soul turn unto it. 
2 Paradiso, iv., 14. 
To speak thus is adapted to your mind, 
Since only through the sense it apprehendeth 
What then it worthy makes of intellect. 
Cf. for the whole of this paragraph, Aristot., de Anima, ii., 7; iii., 3. 4.8. 
—St. Thomas, 1a, q. 78, 4; q. 84,5, 6.—Boethius, lib. v., metr. 4.—St. Bon- 


aventura, Compendium, ii., 45. 


186 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ances, rises the.superior region, where all is spontaneous, pure, 
and luminous. The ancients called it mens: by it is man disting- 
uished from the animals.' We find in it divers faculties: that 
which constitutes science, that which gives counsel, that which in- 
vents, and that which judges. We may contrast with one another, 
the intellect, which marches boldly in search of the unknown, 
and the memory, which returns upon the traces left by the other 
faculty, without being able to follow them to the end.2 We may 
still farther distinguish the active and the passive intellect. The 
active intellect elaborates and combines the perceptions received ; 
it raises them to the condition of ideas, and, in their turn, com- 
bines the ideas. Thought thinks itself, yet is unconscious of it- 
self at its first beginning ; * itis by prolonged labor that it acquires 
the knowledge and possession of itself; activity, carried to its 


highest degree, becomes reflection. The passive intellect contains 


Sore ee 





1 Convito, iii., 2. Only of man and of the divine substances is this mind 
predicated.—Cf. Boethius, lib. i., pros. 4. 
” Convito, ili., 2: Inferno, ii., 3; Paradiso, i., 3. 
* * * * Tn drawing near to its desire 
Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, 
That after it the memory cannot eo. 
Cf. Aristot., de Anima, ili., 3, 4. 
® Paradiso, x., 12. 
I Was not conscious, saving as a man 


Of a first thought is conscious ere it come. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 187 


in potentiality universal forms, such as they exist in act in the 
Divine Thought. Through this faculty is it that all things may 
be comprehended; it hence remains necessarily indeterminate, 
susceptible of divers modifications, and it is also called the possi- 
ble intellect. ! ; 

We must recognize in the human mind still other elements 
which present a passive character. We perceive in it primitive 
ideas of which we cannot explain the origin, self-evident truths 
which are believed without being demonstrated.2 And, if we re- 
fuse to confess such ideas innate, we are at least obliged to admit 


as such the faculties which form the very foundation of our be- 





! Purgatorio, xxv., 21. Allusion to an error of Averroes. 
* * * * In his doctrine separate 
He made the soul from possible intellect. 

Convito, iv., 21. Cf. Aristot., de Anima, iii., 5, 6; andfor the refutation 
of Averroes, St. Thomas, Sum. c. Gent., ii., 73; and the two treatises of 
Albert the Great and St. Thumas, Contra Averrhoestas. 

2 Purgatorio, xviii., 19. 

But still, whence cometh the intelligence 
Of the first notions, man is ignorant, etc, 
Cf. Aristot., Anal., post., i., 31, 
Paradiso, ii, 15. 
* * * * Self-evident 
In guise of the first truth that man believes, 
Cf. Aristot.. de Anima, iil.. 9. Tonie.. i.. 1. 


188 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ing,! There are then principles that have not come to us from 
without, and that we have not gotten for ourselves. There is a 
continuous interior creation which proclaims the invisible pres- 
ence of the Divinity. At the upper term of his nature, as at the 
lower, by his reason as by his senses, man touches upon that 
which is not himself, and finds the limits which restrict his inde- 
pendence. 

These facts well established will serve to mark the way that 
leads-from ignorance and error to true science. The first act of a 
conscientious study will be to fix the limits where such study 
must come to an end, and beyond which it would be rash to wish 
to pursue the rationale of things. The second will be to get rid 
of prejudices previously imbibed; for they who have learned 
nothing attain to really philosophical habits of thought more 
easily than do others, who, together with long training, have re- 


ceived many false opinions. These preliminary conditions ful- 





1 Purgatorio, xviii., 21. 

Innate within you is the power that counsels. 

2 Convito, iv., 21: In this soul are present the power proper to itself, the 
intellectual, and the divine.—Cf. Plato,—Cicero, de Senectute, 21.—Lib. 
de Causis, 3: Omnis anima nobilis habet tres operationes. . . operatio ani- 
malis, intellectualis, et divina. 


8 De Monarchia, lib. i. Facilius et perfectius veniunt ad habitum 
philosophicze veritatis qui nihil unquam audiverunt, quam qui audivcrunt 
per tempora et falsis opinionibus imbuti sunt... Paradiso, xiii. 41. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 18g 


filled, it is permissible to begin effective researches. The wise 
man will first drink deeply at the sources of observation, and will 
then slowly advance by the way of reasoning ; he will wear lead up- 
on his feet: never, without seeking the aid of a helpful distine 

tion, will he make the two different steps of affirmation and nega- 
tion.’ He will not allow himself to be detained by the distrac- 
tions he may meet upon the way: if new thoughts come athwart 
the path of the old ones, they mutually delay one another in their 
onward course, and all recede from the goal.2. Three words sum 
up these precepts: experience, prudence, and perseverance. By 
this means may we enter into that calm possession of the truth 


which constitutes certitude. Certitude rests upon different bases, 





1 Paradiso, ii., 32. 
* * * Experiment, * * * * * 
* * * which is wont to be 
The fountain to the rivers of your arts. 
Ibid., xiii., 38. 
And lead shall this be always to thy feet, 
To make thee like a weary man, move slowly 
Both to the Yes and No thou seest not. 
2 Purgatorio, v., 6. 
For evermore the man in whom is springing 
Thought upon thought, removes from him the mark, 
Because the force of one the other weakens. 


Cf. Hugh of St. Victor, Instit. Monast., iv. 


1gO Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


according to the different orders of knowledge in which it is to 
be acquired. Itis in the testimony of the senses when it relates 
to objects proper to any one of them; it is in the indemonstrable 
axioms which have already been pointed out; it is in the unani- 
mous consent of men on questions lying within the domain of 
reason: for the hypothesis of universal deception, enveloping the 
human race in an invincible blindness, would be a blasphemy 
horrible to utter.’ And yet, at the feet of known truths, new 
doubts are always springing up, as new shoots start from the 
bases of trees. Certitude remains always surrounded by the ob- 
security inherent in all things human. The only light in which is 
no darkness, is the light of faith.” 

3. In the moral order, the first facts we encounter are again in 
the number of those in which the soul shows itself passive; this 
is why they are called passions. It would take long to enumer- 
ate them, but they may all be referred to anterior dispositions 
which we may call appetites. There are three sorts of appetites. 
The first, natural, which is unconscious of itself, and which is in- 


deed the irresistible tendency of all physical beings toward the 





1 Convito, iv.,8; ii., 9.—Cf. Aristot. Topic., lib. i.,cap. I.— St. Thomas, 
prima, q. 85, art. 6. 

2 Paradiso, iv., 44.—Convito, ii., 9; iv..15. The Christian judgment is of 
superior force, and is the overthrower of every false imputation, thanks 


to the supreme light of Heaven by which it is illumined. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 191 


satisfying of their needs; the second, sensitive, which has its ex- 
ternal motor in sensible things, and which is by turns concupis- 
cible or irascible; the third, intellectual, of which the object is 
appreciable only by the thinking faculty. These appetites again 
may be reduced to a single common principle, love.’ From the 
Creator down to the humblest of ereatures, nothing escapes this 
great law.2 Simple bodies tend by attraction, which is a sort of 
love, to the point in space destined to receive them. Composite 
bodies have a sympathy, a love of the same kind as the preced- 
ing, for the places where they were formed: they there acquire 
the plentitude of their development, they draw thence all their 
powers. Plants show a preference, a marked affection, for such 
climates, exposures, and soils as are best suited to their constitu- 
tions. Animals give signs of a livelier species of attachment, a 
love easily recognizable which mutually attracts them to one an- 
other, and sometimes attracts them to man. Finally, man is en- 


dowed with a love, proper to himself, for all things virtuous and 


1 Convito, iv., 21, 26.—Cf. St. Thomas, 14 2, q. 26, 1. 
2 Purgatorio, xvii., 31. Cary’s Tr. 
Creator, nor created being e’er 
sndaoced was without love, 
Or natural, or the free spirit’s grcwth, ete. 


Of. Plato. Banquet.--Boethius, lib, iii., pr. 25 lib. iy., met, 6 


192 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


perfect; or rather, as his nature partakes both of the simplicity 
and of the immensity of the divine nature, man unites in himself all 
these various kinds of love. Like to simple bodies, he yields to 
attraction, which acts on him as weight; he borrows from com- 
posite bodies the sympathy which he feels for the place of his 
birth; like the plants, he has preferences for the ailments favor- 
able to his health ; like the animals, he is attracted by appearances 
which flatter his senses; and finally, and this is his human, or 
rather, his angelic prerogative, he loves truth and goodness. 3 
Now, the first three sorts of love are the work of necessity ; only 
in the last two, which emanate from the senses and the intelli- 
gence, is the moral being discoverable. Here, on closer examina- 
tion, we shall find the point where passive existence ends and 
activity begins. 

As soon as an object capable of pleasing presents itself, it 
awakens in us the sensation of pleasure. The faculty we have 
named apprehension enters into exercise, it perceives the relation 
of the said object to our needs, it develops this relation until the 
soul turns toward it and bows to its influence: this inclination is 
love; and the new pleasure accompanying this modification ren- 
ders it dear to us and at the same time enduring. Then the soul 


which has been thus thrilled enters into movement: this spiritual 








movement is desire; this desire can find no repose except in the 





1 Convito, iii., 3. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 193 


enjoyment of, that is, the possession of, the object loved.’ Such 
is the universal fact; such is, to speak the language of the school, 
the matter of love, always good in itself, for it is the work of a 
specific, natural disposition, only revealed by its effects, and of 
which the first act, instantaneous and not reflected upon, is de- 


serving neither of praise nor of blame.? But love becomes vir- 





1 Purgatorio, xviii. 7, 11. 
The soul, which is created apt to love, 
Is mobile unto everything that pleases, 
Soon as by pleasure she is waked to action, * * * 
And if, when turned, towards it she incline, 
Love is that inclination ; it is nature, 
Which is by pleasure bound in you anew. * * * 
So comes the captive soul into desire, 
Which is a motion spiritual, and ne’er rests 
Until she doth enjoy the thing beloved. 
Cf. Aristot., de Anima, iii.—St. Thomas, 14 2, q. 26, 2. 
2 Purgatorio, xviii. 17, 20. 
Every substantial form, that segregate 
From matter is, and with it is united, 
Specific power has in itself collected, 
Which without act is not perceptible..... 
“# * * * * And this first desire 
Merit of praise or blame containeth not, 
Ibid., 13. 
* * * Its matter may perchance appear 
Aye to be good ; but yet not each impression 
Is good, albeit good may fe the wax. 


194 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tuous or blameworthy according to the choice which it makes 
among the things that solicit it. Before the soul took on the cor- 
poreal form under which it was to become a child, God looked upon 
it with complacency. Happy Himself, He communicated to it the 
impulse which makes it turn to Him in its search for happiness. 
He continues to attract it by causing the rays of His eternal glory 
to shine out before it. It, in turn. could no more help loving Him 
than it could hate itself.!. If the soul participates more than any 
other terrestrial being in the divine nature, and if it is a property 
of the divine nature to will to exist. the soul also wishes to exist, 
it desires this with all the energy inherent in it, and, as its exist- 
ence depends altogether upon God, it naturally desires to be 
united to Him in order to insure its own existence.’ Then, the 
attributes of God being reflected in human qualities and human 
virtues, when the soul finds them in another soul like unto itself, 


it unites itself spiritually with that soul, it loves it also.* Finally, 





1 Purgatorio, xvi. 29. 
Forth from the hand of Him, who fondles it 
Before it is, like to a little girl 
Weeping and laughing in her childish sport, 
Issues the simple soul, that nothing knows, 
Save that, proceeding from a joyous Maker, 
Gladly it turns to that which gives it pleasure. 


* Convito, iii. 2.—Plato, Phaedras.—St. Thomas, 1a 2”, q, 10, 1. 
3 Thid.., ili. 2: 


In the Thirteenth Century. 195 


the whole of creation appears to the soul asa field which retains 
(races of the Eternal Husbandman, and each creature as worthy 
to be loved according to the measure of good which He has be- 
stowed upon it.’ Such is the legitimate form of love; it consists 
in that just proportionment of our affections which primarily bears 
them on toward the supreme good, and then makes them duly 
measure themselves out toward lesser goods.? Love may take on 
forms less pure. The ignorant soul is deceived by the first and 
lowest pleasures which it encounters, and it pursues them with 
rash ardor.’ Again, it may grow lax in the pursuit of real good. 
or worse, it may turn toward evil. We have already seen how 
the seven capital sins are derived from these three species of aber- 
ration.4 It is then true to say that love is the common seed of 


justice and of sin.® How enumerate all the good and all the evil 


1 Paradiso, xxvi. 22.—Cf. Hugh of St. Victor, Adnotationes in Ecclesi- 
astem. 
2 Purgatorio, xvii. 33. 
While in the first it well directed is, 
And in the second moderates itself, 
It cannot be the cause of sinful pleasure. 
3 Purgatorio, xvi. 31. 


1 See above, Chap. ii. 
5 Purgatorio, xvii. 35. 
Hence thou mayst comprehend that love must be 
The seed within yourselves of every virtue, 
And eyery act that merits punishment. 


190 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


fruit that it may bear: loyalty, the care of the welfare of the be- 
loved object, zeal for its glory, finally, union with it, a union which 
mutually assimilates to beings and blends them intoone?’ How 
describe the beneficent, regenerative effect of a chaste affection ? 
And how explain the reciprocal contagion of sensual affections ? 2 
By working such wonderful revolutions in the secret places of the 
heart, love, however passive it may be in its origin, shows itself 
active in its results. 

But, if this activity is determined only in presence of the 
incitements of the exterior ‘world, can we say that it is free? 
A common and misleading opinion attributes all our actions to the 
stars, as if the spheres bore along all beings in a necessary direc- 
tion. Doubtless, the spheres exercise a sort of initiative over the 
majority of the movements of our sensibility: but this initiative 
may encounter in us a resistance which, difficult at first, becomes 


unconquerable after we have faithfully struggled.* A still greater 








Cf. Plato, Banquet.—St. Augustine: Boni aut mali mores sunt boni aut 


mali amores. 


1 Purgatorio, xxx. 13.—Convito, iii. 2; iv.1.... Onde Pittagora dice 
Nell ’amista si fa uno di piu. Cf. Cicero., de Officiis, i. 16.—St. Thomas, 1: 
2e, q. 28, 1. 


2 Inferno, v. 34.—Purgatorio, xxx. 41; xxxi. 8.—Conyito. iii. 8.— Vita 
nuova, passim.—Cf. Plato, Banquet, Pheedrus. 


3 Purgatorio, xvi., 23. 


Ye who are living every cause refer 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 197 


power, that of God, acts upon us without compelling us. He 
created in us that better part of ourselves which is not subject to 
the influences of the spheres.! He endowed us with free will ; 
and this gift, the most excellent, the most worthy of His good- 
ness, the most precious in His eyes, all intelligent creatures. 


and they alone, have receiyed.? The will can yield only by itsown 








Still upward to the heavens, as if all things 
They of necessity moved with themselves. * * 
The heavens your movements do initiate, 
I say not all; but granting that I say it, 
Light has been given you for good and eyil, 
And free yolition ; which if some fatigue 
In the first battles with the heavens it suffers 
Afterwards conquers all, if well ‘tis nurtured. 

Cf. Plato, Timaeus. St. Thomas, 1a, q. 83. 1; 1a 2x, q. 9, 5. 

1 (The substitution of the term environment for influences of the 
spheres, will suffice to give a modern turn to many of the passages relat- 
ing to this subject.—Tr.) 

2 Purgatorio, xvi., 27. 

To greater force and to a better nature, 
Though free, ye subject are, and that creates 
The mind in you the heavens have not in charge. 
(bid. xviii., 23.—Paradiso, y., 7. 
The greatest gift that in his largess God 
Creating made, and unto His own goodness, 


Nearest conformed, and that which He doth prize 


198 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


determination; it is like a flame, which repeated efforts of an ex- 
terior force cannot constrain to descend contrarily to that natural 
bent which causes it to ascend. Often, it is true, the will seems 
to yield to violence; but this is still in virtue of its own choice, 
as an evil to which it submits through fear of some still greater 
ill. Y Tt is also true that instinctive movements escape from its 
control, and that often, in its despite, smiles and tears betray the 
most secret thoughts.* But, outside of these circumstances, the 
will remains the arbiter of its choice: placed in presence of two 
objects exercising over it equal attraction, it would remain unde- 
cided to the end; * we must then admit with the will a faculty 
which may counsel it, which, as the poet says, keeps watch upon 


the threshold of assent, to receive or to reject affections good or 





Most highly, is the freedom of the will, 
Wherewith the creatures of intelligence 
Both all and only were and are endowed. 
Cf. Aristot. Ethics, iii., 5. Boethius, 1. y., pr. 2.—St. Thomas, prima, q. 
59. 3. 
1 Paradiso, iv., 26-34. 
° Purgatorio, xxi., 35. 
But yet the power that wills cannot do all things. 
3 Paradiso, iy., 1. 
Between two viands equally removed 
And tempting, a free man would die of hunger 
Ere elther he could bring unto his teeth. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 199 


ill.! Thus, even supposing that an unavoidable necessity pre- 
sides in us at the beginning of love, there is also in us a power 
competent to restrain its progress. 

Now, the counsel which assists in our decisions, is discern- 
ment. This is the faculty which seizes upon the differences be- 
tween actions in so far as they are co-ordinated to an end; wemay 
call it the eye of the soul, and the fairest off-shoot springing from 
the root of reason.* By it is the moral connected with the intel- 
lectual order: in fact, the will cannot act without the concurrence 
of the understanding; but this concurrence could not be complete 
without a perfect equality of the two powers, an equality not to 
be looked for inour fallen nature.* Discernment, when it is ap- 
plied to the distinction between good and evil, receives the name 
of conscience, and then one also finds in it a something passive, 
extraneous to the human personality. For the wicked man, there 
isin ita gnawing worm which allows him no repose, a scum 
which he would willingly cast far away from him: for the good 


man. the feeling of his innocence is like a solid suit of armor or a 





1 Purgatorio, xviii.. 21. 
Innate within you is the power that counsels, 
And it should keep the threshold of assent. 
Cf. St. Thomas, la 2, q. 14. 2. 
2 Convito, ili., 2; iv., 8.—Cf. St. Thomas, Prolog. in Ethic. Aristot. 


3 Paradiso, v., 2; Vil., 20; xv., 27. 


200 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


faithful companion whose presence reassures him in the midst of 
dangers.’ 

Here again we must duly consider the observations. which have 
been adduced, and deduce from them practical consequences, 
The antagonism between vice and virtue had been made the sub- 
ject of a fable dear to the poets and philosophers of antiquity, as 
a symbol, and asa lesson. The Italian poet appropriated and 
rejuvenated it. Two women appeared before him. The one was 
pale, mis-shapen, and a stammerer, but, when the eye rested up- 
on her, it seemed to give to her beauty, color, and voice: she 
sang, and, a harmonious syren, she at once captivated imprudent 
ears. The other, in turn, showed herself simple and worthy of 
veneration ; casting a lofty glance upon her rival, she caused her 
garments to be rent asunder, and exhibited her tainted by an in- 
fectious corruption. Of these two women, the first was Volupt- 
uousness, the second, Wisdom. ? 

But the struggle is easy for him who has not fallen; to con- 
template it in all its interest, we must consider it at the doubtful 
moment when the soul, long held under the sombre sway of vice, 


escapes from it by a happy deliverance, and strives to re-enter the 





! Inferno, xxviii., 39.—Purgatorio, xiii., 30.—Cf. Plato, Repub., passim. 
—Cicer.: Mea mihi conscientia pluris quam omnium sermo.—St. Thomas, 
la, q. 79, 13; 1a, 2@, q. 94, 1. 


2 Purgatorio, xix., 3. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 201 


domain of virtue. -The poet has chosen to describe under an al- 
legorical veil of transparent tissue ‘ this expiatory pilgrimage, 
this pathway constructed by mercy which leads from the city of 
the wicked, to the city of God. Man, in his return to good, may 
be hindered by obstacles of more than one kind. The first is is- 
olation; this is the fate of him, who, by his fall, has cut himself 
off from religious society, which alone could offer him the start- 
ing point necessary to enable him to begin to rise again. Then 
comes negligence, which causes men to delay until their last mo- 
ments, the formation of salutary aspirations ; death may come un- 
expectedly, breaking in upon sterile regrets; or agai the multi- 
tude of temporal occupations may leave to spiritual interests a 
narrowly restricted and sorely disputed place. Still, all these ob- 
stacles united cannot authorize despair. Up to the last hour of 
life, the stem of hope remains green; the flower of repentance 


may always burst into bloom upon it.” Three preliminary con- 





1 Purgatorio, viii., 7. 
Here, Reader, fix thine eyes well on the truth, 
For now indeed so subtile is the veil, 
Surely to penetrate within is easy. 
2 Purgatorio, iii., 46; iv., 38; v., 19; vii., 31. 
* * * * * Ts not so lost 
Eternal Love, that it cannot return, 


So long as hope has anything of green. 


202 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


clitions form, as it were, the three steps that lead to the threshold 
of expiation. We must have a faithful conscience which shall 
reflect in its bright transparency, the image of past faults; a po- 
tent sorrow which shall rend and reduce to ashes, the hardness 
of our hearts; and a firm resolution to satisfy eternal justice by 
a spontaneous chastisement. But the offender could not be the 
proper judge of his own sincerity, the arbiter of the amount of 
tears he ought to shed, the sole executor of the punishment in- 
curred by him. Thence the necessity of an external ministry, of 
a tribunal for souls, of which the judge, holding in his hand the 
two keys of science and of authority, may open and shut, accord- 
ing to desert, the gateway of reconciliation.’ This gate opens the 
way to a humiliating and laborious career, but one in which the fa- 
tigue diminishes, and the ignominy is effaced, in accordance with 
the diminution in the number of steps still remaining to be trod- 
den ere the goal be reached. But woe to him who should cast a 
glanee backward! for him would vanish the fruit of the trials al- 


ready happily ended.2, He who wishes to walk in the way even 





1 Purgatorio, ix., 45. 
I saw a portal, and three stairs beneath, 
Diverse in colour, to go up to it, 
And a gate-keeper, who yet spake no word. 
Cf. St. Gregory, Homilia, xvi., in Ezechielem. St. Bonaventura, Com- 
pendium, Vi., 25. 
2 Purgatorio, ix., 38, 44. 


* * * Forth returns whoever looks behind. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 203 


to the end, must first apply himself to the meditation of the ex- 
amples furnished him, by profane history and the Holy Scriptures, 
of the vices to which he had been addicted, and of the contrary 
virtues. Thus regarded in the living types wherein they have 
found their most complete expression, vice and virtue cannot be 
compared Without calling forth an energetic preference.' From 
that moment, he will betake himself to the practice of acts con- 
trary to those of which he wishes to obliterate the traces within 
his soul. Habit, by an equal force, will destroy the pervese dis- 
positions formed by habit, and, itself a second nature, will neu- 
tralize the evil tendencies of nature.2 These efforts, and the re- 
sistances they encounter, lead to the employment of voluntary 
suffering as a means of repressing, or, to speak the language of 
asceticism, of mortifying, of annihilating unregulated appetites. 
The image of God which dwelt in the innocent soul has disap- 
peared in the presence of sin: it has left a void which reparative 


sorrow alone can fill.2 The combined resources which the most 





} Purgatorio, passim, especially xtii., 15. 
2 Purgatorio, passim. Conyvito, iii., 8. 
Cf. Aristot., Ethics, ii., 1. 
3 Purgatorio, xix., 31.—Paradiso, vii., 28. 
And to his dignity no more returns, 
Unless he fill up where transgression empties 
With righteous pains for criminal delights 
Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, vii., 2, 


204 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


profound knowledge of the human heart can put at the service of 
the most steadfast courage, would still prove insufficient. There 
are secret horrors which return to trouble the memory. The de- 
mon of fear comes gliding athwart the paths of penitence.! Be- 
sides, the work of moral regeneration is a second creation; it 
could not be accomplished without divine intervention. It is to 
be solicited by prayer; prayer does violence even to the Al- 
mighty, because the Almighty has made to Himself a tender law 
of permitting Himself to be overcome by love, that He may in 
His turn overcome by beneficence.? Finally, at the term of the 
expiatory course, as at its beginning, to quit it as well as to en- 
ter upon it, we must render submission to a religious authority, 
and fulfil the conditions without which God does not treat with 
us: confession for oblivion, tears for consolation, and shame for 


definitive rehabilitation.* Rehabilitation replaces man on the lofty 





1 Purgatorio, Viii., 31. 
2 Purgatorio, ix., 28; xi., 1; etc., ete. 
Purgatorio, vi., 10.—Paradiso, xx., 33. 
Regnum ceelorum suffereth violence 
From fervent love, and from that living hope 
That overcometh the Divine volition ; 
Not in the guise that man o’ercometh man, 
But conquers it because it will be conquered, 
And conquered, conquers by benignity. 
Cf. Boethius, 1., v., pros., 6. 


3 Purgatorio, XxXxi., 1, ete.—Cf. St. Thomas, 3a q. 84-90, 


In the Thirteenth Century. 205 


plane which he occupied in the beginning: it remakes him such 
as he was when he came from the hand of his Creator; it re- 
constructs for him in the joys of his conscience a sort of moral 
Kdeu, the highest degree of blessedness that can be tasted upon 
earth. This terrestrial beatitude consists in the virtuous exercise 
of the human faculties, in a constant activity which witnesses 
to itself as to the legitimacy of its actions.1 Nevertheless, this is 
not the last limit which has been set to the happiness of man ; or 
rather, this was the limit set by reason, but revelation has car- 
ried it beyond.” 
Il. 

The same drama that we haye seen unfolded in regard to the 
individual, will be represented also in history, only with other 
events, and under more solemn forms. The poet contemplates, 
under figure of a magnificent vision,’ the religious, and conse- 
quently the moral and intellectual destinies of the human race. 
The scene opens in the terrestrial paradise, a sojourn of ineffable 


delights, first-fruits of the love of God, the abiding-place of that 


1 Purgatorio, xxvii., and following, De Monarchia, iii... . Beatitudi- 
nem hujus vitz quie in operatione propriz virtutis consistit, et per terres- 
trem paradisum figuratur .. .—Convito, iv., 17.—Cf. Aristot., Ethics, i., 8. 

2 Convito, iv., 22.—Cf. Plato, Epinomis, Repub. vi. 


3’ Purgatorio, xxix.-xxxiii. 


206 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


<= 


golden age of which the imperfect remembrance still charmed the 
dreams of the antique world. But, in presence of the recent marvels 
of creation, and of the universal obedience which heaven and earth 
yielded to their Author, woman alone, a creature that had just 
emerged from nothingness, refused to endure the veil of happy 
ignorance which covered her eyes. Man became her accomplice : 
banished, he exchanged joys without a touch of bitterness for 
misery and tears. And yet, another age of gold was to flourish, 
und the fallen race to re-enter into its inheritance.! This trium- 
phal return is figured by the miraculous procession which comes 
to take possession of the re-found Eden, Amid Apocalyptic 
splendors, preceded by twenty-four ancients, who are the writers 
of the Old Law, surrounded by the four prophetic animals, sym- 
bolizing the four Evangelists, and followed by seven other person- 
ages, in whom we recognize the authors of the other books of the 
New Law,? Christ advances under the form of a griffon, whose 


terrestrial body and eerial wings denote the hypostatic union of 





! Purgatorio, Xxix., 9. 
For there where earth and heaven obedient were, 
The woman only, and but just created, 
Could not endure to stay "neath any veil. 
Paradiso, xxvi., 39.—Cf. Hugh of St. Victor, Erudit. theolog., 1. 6.—St. 
Bonaventura, Compendium, ii. 65. 
* Purgatorio, xxix., 28, 31, 45.—Cf. Richard of St. Victor, super A poc- 


alypsum. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 207 


the two natures, human and divine.1 He draws a car, emblem of 
the Church, on which stands a lady clothed in symbolic garments ; 
this is Theology: * three nymphs on her right hand, and four upon 
her left, represent the theological and the cardinal virtues passing 
on together with harmonious steps. As the hymns resound, sung 
by the angels, the train progresses and approaches the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil, which, according to a beautiful tra- 
dition, has become the tree of salvation, the redeeming cross. * 
The car remains attached to this tree, and, while the glorious lady, 
with her seven companions, is left to guard it, the griffon departs 
with the ancients: Christ. quitting the earth, leaves the Church 


under the care of knowledge and virtue. But suddenly, an 





1 Purgatorio. xxix.,36.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, in Psalm., 90; in Lucam, 


xiii., 34. 


2 Purgatorio, xxx., 11. 
Over her snow-white veil with olive cinct 


Appeared a lady under a green mantle, 
Vested in color of the living flame. 

3 Purgatorio, xxxii., 15.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, Serm., 1. de Invent. S. 
Crucis. There is also in this allegory a reminiscence of the tree in the 
vision of Daniel, which is likewise a figure of the cross. St. Bonayen- 
tura, Compendium, iv., 21. 

4 Purgatorio, xxxii., 17-30. Dean Plumptre’s Tr. 

Alone she sat, on ground of truth the base, 


Left there as guardian of the mystic ear. 


208 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


eagle falls like lightning upon the tree, from which he tears the 
bark, and upon the car, which bends beneath his weight. Then 
comes a fox which finds its way within, and then a portion is 
torn off by a dragon that issues from the gaping earth. Thus far 
it is easy to recognize the persecutions of the Roman emperors 
which so harried the Church, the heresies by which it was deso- 
lated, and the schisms by which it was torn. Soon, the eagle re- 
appeared, less menacing but not less dangerous; he shook his 
plumes above the sacred car, which speedily underwent a mon- 
strous transformation. From divers parts of it arose seven heads 
armed with ten horns; a courtesan was seated in the midst; a 
giant stood at her side, exchanging with her impure caresses 
which he interrupted to scourge her cruelly. Then, cutting loose 
the metamorphosed car, he bears it away, and is lost with it in 
the depths of the forest. Is not this again the Church, enriched 
by the gifts of princes who have become her protectors, sadly 
marred in appearance, sundry of her members defiled by the taint 
of the seven capital sins, and herself ruled over by unworthy pon- 
tiffs? Is not this the court of Rome, exchanging criminal flat- 
teries with the temporal power, which flatteries are to be followed 
by cruel injuries, when the Holy See, torn from the foot of the 
cross of the Vatican is transferred to a distant land, on the banks 


of a foreign river?? But these ills will not be without end nor 





1 Purgatorio, xxxii., 37-538.—We here repeat that we cannot acquiesce 
in the severity of these judgments, dictated by anger and penned in sor- 


Tow. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 209 


without retribution. The tree that lost and that saved the world 
cannot be touched with impunity, and if the Church has been 
made militant here below, it is with the liability of suffering from 


passing reverses, but also with the assurance of final victory.’ 


NOL 


Pursuing this species of induction, with which we have to make 
ourselves familiar, and which concludes from the varied facts of 
the visible to the invariable laws of the invisible world, we are 
led by our thought into the places where expiations begun here 
below, amid many trials and interruptions, are finished under the 
operation of an unalterable law. At the same time that souls are 
there purified from the stains of earth, they are initiated into the 
joys of heaven. And the sufferings, be they as rigorous as they 
may in their intensity, find an incomparable solace in the certainty 
of their finally coming to an end. 

1. We may represent to ourselves Purgatory as a mountain, of 
which the base is laved by the dcean, while the summit touches 
the heavens. Conical in its structure, it is divided into nine parts. 
The first division is a sort of vestibule, the inhabitants of which 


expiate by a proportionate delay the detriment to their souls oc- 





' Purgatorio, xxxii., 15; xxxiii., 12.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, in Psalm. 
1; in Lucam, xiii., 19. The Church militant is figured by the terrestrial] 


paradise. 


210 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


casioned by the tardiness of their repentance. Then follow seven 
concentric circles, one above another, each zone narrower than the 
one below it: in these is wrought the purification from the seven 
principal vices, the seven culpable forms of love. Finally, at the 
top, at the termination of the region of expiations, the terrestrial 
paradise extends its umbrageous solitudes, into which enter only 
the regenerated souls who come to drink from two springs, for- 
getfulness of their errors and remembrance of their merits.! 

2. They who dwell in these melancholy regions show them- 
selves invested with the subtile bodies of which we have already 
explained the formation; bodies impalpable, eluding him who 
would embrace them, not intercepting the light. and yet so organ- 
ized that suffering may be possible within and visible without.” 
This is why material torments are prepared for them, exactly pro- 


portioned to the faults they are to repair: enormous burdens bow- 





1 Purgatorio, passim. 
2 Purgatorio, ii., 27. 
O empty shadows, save in aspect only } 
Three times behind it did I clasp my hands, 
As oft returned with them to my own breast! 
Purgatorio, v., 9. 
When they became aware I gave no place 
For passage of the sunshine through my body, 
They changed their song into a long, hoarse ** Oh!” 


Thid., xxi., 49; xxv., 35; xxvi., 4. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 211 


ing the backs of the proud; hair shirts and blindness for the en- 
vious; dense smoke enveloping such as have given way to anger ; 
the incessant onward motion of the slothful; the ignominious pos- 
ture of the avaricious, groveling upon the earth, the treasures of 
which they had loyed too dearly ; hunger emaciating the visages 
of the gluttonous; the flame whence the voluptuous issue puri- 
fied. To these pangs are united other penitential means of which 
Christian asceticism had already made essay in this life—medita- 
tion, prayer, and confession.! 

3. In this rigorous state in which they have been placed by 
death, the suffering just preserve the memory of their past life, 
and, if the knowledge of the present is lacking to them, a respect- 
able, because widely spread, opinion attributes to them a knowl- 
edge of the future. They then find themselves with their previ- 
ous faculties, inclinations, and affections, except that all which 
savored of evil has been eliminated.? For them, terrestrial rival- 
ries have vanished with the terrestrial distinctions of which they 
were the result. If they keep up an interest in the affairs of this 
nether world, it is through a mutual interchange of compassion 
and prayers. Initiated into all the mysteries of sorrow, they ask 


that Heaven may spare such pains to us; and, on our side, our 





1 Purgatorio, passim.—Cf. Bonaventura, Compendium, vii., 2, 3.—Cf. 
Boethius, lib. iv., pros. 4. 


2 Purgatorio, ii., 36; viii., 42; xiv., 24, 33. 


ene Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


prayers and pious works ascend to God whom they incline 
toward us, to descend again in blessings upon the just whose 
term of penance they abridge.' But censcience, which was giv- 
en to man to control the impatience of his desires, justifies in 
their eyes the rigors which they endure; it makes them accept 
and almost hold dear these reparative sufferings.” The thought 
of the accomplishment of the eternal decrees; the certainty of the 
happy impossibility of sinning thenceforth in which they find 
themselves ; the hope of the glorious inheritance the possession 
of which cannot be deferred for them beyond the last day of the 
world; finally love, which never leaves them; then too the fra- 
ternal canticles chanted together, the sacred texts repeated in 
frequent converse, the peace of cloudless days, and the nights 
passed under the guardianship of angels; * the unity of the su/- 
Jering Church with the Church militant and the Church triwm- 
phant : these are surely consolations sufficient to sustain the soul 
until the hour of deliverance comes. At that hour, the soul sud- 


denly experiences within itself the feeling of recovered purity and 





1 Purgatorio, vii., 46; xix.,45; xi., 7; iif., 48; iv., 46; v., 25, etc.—Cf. 





St. Bonaventura, Compendium, vii., 4. 

2 Purgatorio, xxi., 27; xxvi., 5; xix., 26. 

3 Purgatorio, viii., 9.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, vii., 3. In 
magist. sent., lib. iv., Dist. 20. p.1.q.5. Angels and demons present 


within the limits of Purgatory. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 213 


re-conquered freedom: it wills to make trial of its liberty, it finds 
itself joyous in having thus willed, and, whilst the sacred moun- 
tain trembles and innumerable acclamations are heard, it rises, 
borne only by its own will, toward the spheres of eternal bless- 


edness.! 
IV. 


After having accompanied humanity through all the phases of 
this existence, compounded of good and evil, which it has tra- 
versed, we must make ourselves acquainted with the medium in 
which they are accomplished. For, if man reflects within him- 
self nature, asa diminished but yet living image, he, in turn, leaves 
in nature a reflection of himself, feebler and less animated but 
more extended. These are two foci, which mutually exchange 
luminous rays: the first named concentrates, the-second, disperses 
them. 

1. The incompleteness of contemporary knowledge reduced to 


a small number the really scientific explanations of the successive 


1 Purgatorio, xxi., 25. 
It trembles here, whenever any soul 
Feels itself pure, so that itsoars, or moves 
To mount aloft, and such a cry attends it. 
Of purity the will alone gives proof, 
Which, being wholly free to change its convent, 


Takes by surprise the soul, and helps it ply. 


214 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


facts in nature. Rain, lightning, volcanoes, the ebb and flow of 
the sea,! all the phenomena which, by their grandeur or by their 
frequent occurrence, called forth a livelier attention, gave rise to 
hypotheses unequally satisfactory, rarely connected by any logical 
bond, and forming among themselves no body of doctrines. On 
the contrary, the ensemble of physical phenomena, the plan, the 
relations, the reciprocal action of the larger bodies in creation, the 
system of the visible universe, readily lent itself to general views, 
to deductions from analogy, to the divinations of the higher met- 
aphysics, to reasonings based upon the consideration of final 
causes. Philosophy there found itself in its own domain. 

2. An inexact but universally admitted cosmography fixed 
the dimensions of the terrestrial globe, making it 6,500 miles in 
diameter, and consequently 20,400 miles in eireumference.? The 
configuration of this globe was scarcely more accurately known. 
Jerusalem, the moral centre of humanity, was regarded as also 
the geographical centre of the continent set apart for the habita- 
tion of men.?. From the sources of the Ebro to the mouths of the- 


Ganges, from the extremity of Norway to the end of Ethiopia, the 








1 Purgatorio, v., 38.—Paradiso, Viii., 25 : xvi., 28. 
And as the turning of the lunar heaven 
Covers and bares the shores without a pause. 
Paradiso, xxiii., 21. 


3 Convito, ii., 7, in fine. 3 Purgatorio, xxvii., 1; ii., 1. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 215 


inhabited world filled up nearly one hemisphere; ! the ocean em- 
braced the other; and yet, a prophetic idea made men dream of 
distant regions beyond the pillars of Hercules, protected against 
the daring of navigators by a superstitious fear kept up through 
old legends.?_ Then antipodal regions, placed outside of actual 
exploration, became the abode and asylum of mystical imaginings. 
It was natural there to find the site, henceforth inaccessible, of 
“the terrestrial paradise. It seemed a noble thought to place 
the spot where the first father came into being and lost his race, 
diametrically opposite to that other sacred spot where the Son of 
Man died to save that race. Thus the mountain of Eden and the 
mountain of Jerusalem were as the two poles of the world, and 
sustained the axis on which it accomplished its revolutions. It 
seemed also fitting to repeople this primitive land which sin had 
made a solitude, by placing within it the pains of purgatory, re- 
parative of sin. Consequently, it became proper to represent it 
(as in fact was done) as a high cone, divided into several zones, 
at the base of which are lulled all the storms that might disturb 
the calm of penitence, whilst the summit fades away into the ex- 
panse of pure air, where weight ceases to exert its influence, and 


1 Purgatorio, ibid.—Inferno, xxxiv., 42. 


2 Inferno, xxvi., 27.—Paradiso, xxvii., 28, 


216 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


whence it is easy to lift oneself to the skies.1. In the contrasted 
region, beneath the ground on which we tread, open the gulfs of hell. 
Atits lowest depth is found the point toward which all bodies tend. 
There we find also the spirit of evil dwelling in a case of 
ice. A similar void traverses the depths of the other half of the 
plove, These subterranean abysses tell of aneient catastrophes, 
doubtless anterior to the existence of the human race, and yet re- 
tained in itsmemory. Perhaps when the evil angel fell from 
heaven, the land, which occupied the other hemisphere, was 


striken with fear at beholding this fall, and made to itself a veil 





1 Purgatorio, iv., 23; xxi., 20. 
= * * * * Imagine Zion 
Together with this mount on earth to stand, 
£o that they both one sole horizon have, 
And hemispheres diverse ; * * * 
Free is it here from every permutation ; 
What from itself heaven in itself receiveth 
Can be of this the cause, and naught beside ; 
Because that neither rain, nor hail, nor snow, 
Nor dew, nor hoar-frost any higher falls 
Than the short little stairway of three steps. 
Paradiso, i., 31.—Cf. on the geographical and meteorological position of 
the terrestrial Paradise, Bede, quoted by St Thomas, la, q. 102, 1; St. John 
Damascene, quoted by St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 64 ; and Isidore 


Etymol., Xiy., 4, 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 217 


of the sea; then, retreating beneath the heavy weight of the rep- 
robate, it hollowed out these interior cavities, sought refuge in 
our hemisphere, and formed the continent on which we live.! 

3. Astronomical studies were somewhat more advanced. At 
least, the apparent revolutions which wrought change in the aspect 
of the celestial vault, had been described in the books of Ptolemy. 
Arabian observers had noted several constellations in the vicinity 
of the Antarctic pole.2 Certain facts, such as eclipses, the spots 
on the moon, and the milky way, had suggested felicitous ex- 


planations.* While failing to recognize the place which the sun 





1 Inferno, xxxiy., 41. 
Upon this side he fell down out of heaven, 
And all the land, that whilom here emerged, 
For fear of him made of the sea a veil, 
And came to our hemisphere ; and peradventure 
To flee from him, what on this side appears 
Left the place vacant here, and back recoiled. 
2 Purgatorio, i., 8; viii., 28. 
To the right hand I turned, and fixed my mind 
Upon the other pole, and saw four stars, ete. 
Cf. M. Biagioli, commentary on this passage. 
$ Paradiso, ii., 21; xiv., 34.— Convito, ii., 14, 15.— Divers astronomical 
notions, Inferno, xxvi., 43 ; Purgatorio, iv., 21; xv., 2.— Paradiso, i., 13; 


xxvii., 27.—Cf. Aristot., de Calo et mundo, passim. 


218 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


occupies in the planetary system, observers could not fail to ap- 
preciate the greatness of its volume and the importance of its 
functions: it was saluted as the parent of humanity, the first 
minister of nature; in it men beheld an image of God.’ Nor was 
it without an impression of religious awe that mankind had con- 
templated the innumerable orbs suspended in immensity. All 
that was not yet conceded to the stars in distance and in dimen- 
sions, was attributed to them in the way of influences. They 
were presumed to preside over the generation of beings: from them 
emanated the life distributed throughout all the families of plants, 
and all the tribes of animals.” As a seal makes an impression on 
the docile wax, so did their power imprint an ineffaceable character 
on the souls of men at the time of their birth; they continued to 
intervene in the instinctive movements which precede the exer- 
cise of the will: thus was due to them a share in the honors ren- 


dered to genius, in the deserts of actions, whether good or bad. 


1 Paradiso, x., 10-18; xy., 26. 
The greatest of the ministers of nature, 
Who with the power of heaven the world imprints. 
Thid., xxvii., 46. Cf. Plato, Timzeus, Repub., vi. Aristot., Physics, ii., 1. 
2 Purgatorio, xxxii., 18.—Paradiso, vii., 47. 
The soul of every brute and of the plants 
By its potential temperament attracts 


The ray and motion of the holy lights. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 219 


It even needed a sort of audacity thus to limit their empire and 
reserve the standing ground of freedom. Temerity did not go so 
far as to deny the value of horoscopes, or to contest the share of 
the celestial motions in the events that agitate the earth.! We 
already know what, according to the opinions of the day, were 
the order and the number of the heavens. The necessity of ex- 
plaining the universal rotation from east to west had caused to be 
added to the eight spheres of the planets and the fixed stars, a 
ninth heaven, called the primum mobile? This heaven, in its 
turn, was presumed to receive its motion from the attraction ex- 
~ ercised upon every point of the universe by the enveloping Em- 
pyrean, the abode of the Divinity, filled with light, heat, and love. 

Love is the last word of the system of the world: it is love that 


gives rise to the harmony of the spheres, a doctrine so renowned 





! Inferno, xv., 19. — Purgatorio, xvi., 25 ; xx., 5; xxx., 37.— Paradiso 
iv., 20 ; xiii., 34, 44; xxii., 38. 
O glorious stars, O light impregnated 
With mighty virtue, from which I acknowledge 
All of my genius, whatsoe’er it be. 
Convito, ii., 7.— Cf. Plato, Timzeus.—Aristot., de Gen. ii., 3. 
? Paradiso, xxiii., 38 ; xxvii., 34.—Convito, ii., $8, 4.—Cf. St. Thomas 14, 
q. 68, 4. 
8 Purgatorio, xxvi., 20.—Paradiso, xxx., 14.—Cf. Cicero, Somnium 


Scipionis.—Plato, Phvedrus.—St. Thomas, 14, q. 66, 2. 


220 Dante, and Cathohe Philosophy 


among the thinkers of antiquity, a problem solved in the mathe- 
matical laws of modern science.? 

4, But the object of this immense and multiform love, the Being 
who continually moves the worlds by attracting them to Himself, 
is none other than God.* He has set His own likeness in the ad- 
mirable order which is the form of creation; He has left His 
footprints in the beings that compose it, by giving to them, accord- 
ing to their degree of perfection, an instinct which makes them 
contribute in due proportion to the general order. Thus a potent 
impulse causes each creature to pass in some determinate direc- 
tion across the great sea of existence, expands fire, condenses the 


earth, makes hearts beat, and arouses intelligences.? Thus nature 





1 Paradiso, i., 26.—Cf. Plato, Rep., x.—Cicero, Somniwm Scipionis.— 
Plato, Banquet.—Bcethius, lib. ii., pros. 5. 
2 Paradiso, i., 25. 
* * * * Love who governest the heayen 
* * * * The wheel which thou dost make eternal 
Desiring thee, made me attentive to it 
By harmony thou dost modulate and measure. 
Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, xii.—Boethius, lib. i, metr. 5.—St. Thomas 1a 
q. 2, art. 3. 
$ Paradiso, i., 35. 
* * + * Ail things whate’er they be 
Have order among themselves, and this is form, 
That makes the universe resemble God... . 
Hence they move onward unto ports diverse 
O’er the great sea of being; and each one 
With instinct given it which bears it on. 
Ibid. viii., 4.—The great sea of existence is au expressionemployed by 
St. John Damascene.—Cf. St. Thomas, 14, q. 5, 3. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 221 


may be considered as a divine art wrought by the Eternal Artist. 
Art may be considered under three relations: in the thought of 
the artist, in the instrument which he employs, andin the matter 
that he fashions. Similarly, nature is first in the thought of God; 
thus far it is God Himself, and in this point of view it is inviola- 
ble, irreproachable, indefectible. Nature is then in the heavens 
as in an instrument by means of which the supreme goodness is 
exteriorly reproduced; and, as this instrument is perfect, nature 
is also there without flaw. It is finally in the matter fashioned ; 
and there alone is it that the divine action and the celestial influence 
encounter a radical principle of imperfection which they may correct 
but not destroy: there alone is found in nature the antagonism 


between good and eyil." 


! Paradiso, i.,1;x.,4; xxxi.,8; viii., 39.—Inferno, xi., 33.—De Monarch- 
ia. ii. —Cf. Plato, Theztet. Timzeus.—Chalcidius, in Timaum 4, 389, 
408. De Causis 20: ‘*Diversificantur bonitates et dona ex concursu 
recipientis.... Ibid.,24. And, as great thoughts are perpetuated in 
great minds, see in the Hlevations on the Mysteries, by Bossuet, the 


seventh Elevation, 2d week: De La Fe condite des arts. 


CHAPTER IV. 
Goop. 


T N the course of these researches, Good has already often re- 
if vealed itself, but partially, as if in shadow or behind a elond. 
The time has now come to look upon it face to face, to reach it 
by rising from the known to the unknown—from man to society, 
from this mortal life to immortality, from creatures confined with- 
in the limitations of matter and of time to superior beings who 
never were subjected to such bonds. 
I. 

1. Good, for man, is that which he ought to be; it is the last 
end of his existence. This end may be considered both as exter- 
ior, since we tend toward it, and as interior, since a time comes 
when we attain it. Good perceived as without, the possession 
of which we strive to obtain, is happiness; good conceived as 
within, and which we are to realize in ourselves, is called perfec- 
tion. 

The end of man is made manifest to him by an instinet which 


divine goodness has placed in him as a germ, obscure in its begin- 
222 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 223 


nings, and easy to confound with the common appetites of the 
brutes.'. He first perceives the existence of some unknown 
thing to which he aspires, in which alone his desires will find re- 
pose. Then he seeks it: considering the beings that surround him, 
he distinguishes and prefers himself. Then he distinguishes in 
himself several parts; he prefers that which is the most noble, 
namely, the soul: and, as it is natural to take pleasure in the en- 
joyment of the thing loved, he takes pleasure above all in the use 
of the faculties with which his soul has been endowed.? He 
thence learns that he was not born to lead the gross life of the 
brutes, but to love and to know.’ Now, if the two principal 
faculties of the soul are intellect and will, two kinds of functions 
are to be attributed to it—the first, speculative, and the second, 
practical. Hence, there are for man two destinies here below ; 


the one active, wherein he seeks to labor himself; the other 





1 Convito, iv., 22: From the diyine goodness sowed within and infused 
into us from tbe beginning of our generation, arises a growth which the 
Greeks call hormen, that is, the appetite of the natural mind, ete. 

2 Purgatorio, xvii-, 43.—Convito, iv., 22.—Cf. Plato, Banquet, Phzedrus. 
—St. Thomas, la, 2, q. 10, art. 1. 

3 Inferno, xxvi., 40. 

Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang ; 
Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, 


But for pursuit of virtue and of Knowledge. 


224 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


contemplative, wherein he considers the operations of God and of 
nature. These two destinies, figured in the Old Testament by Lia 
and Rachel, and in the New, by Martha and Mary, are represent- 
ed in the poem by Matilda, the great countess, the indefatigable 
ally of Gregory VIL, and by Beatrice, the inspired saint.1 Active 
life, by developing the will of man, leads him to a first degree of 
perfection, and the consciousness he has of this perfection attain- 
ed, gives hima first measure of happiness. But the contemplative 
life is the better part, since it consists in the exercise of the most 
excellent faculty, the intelligence. Now the intelligence cannot 
here below attain to its most complete exercise, which is, to con- 
template the Being sovereignly intelligible, God. Hence, the end 
which is truly the last end, perfection and happiness really worthy 
of the name, are not to be attainedin this world. The three wom- 
en who went to visit the Saviour at the sepulchre, did not find 
Him there, but they found in His place an angel who said to them: 
He is not here, you. will see Him elsewhere. Similarly, three 
schools, that of Epicurus, that of Zeno, and that of Aristotle, seek, 


in the terrestrial sepulchre which we inhabit, the sovereign good 





' Purgatorio, xxvii.,33 ; xxviii., 15 ; xxx., 11.—Convito, iv., 17; ii., 5, ete. 
‘-Cf. Aristot., Ethies, i., 6; x., 8; vii., 14.—Lia and Rachel, Richard of St. 
Sictor, de Praepar. ad contempl., 1. (Commentators differ greatly in 


regard to the personality of Matilda. Tr.) 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 225 


and fail to find it. But the interior feeling which, like a heaven- 
ly messenger, comes to us from above, makes known to us that in 
another life that Good awaits us. 1 

Thus the confused instinct, the awakening of which we have 
indicated, is no other than the love of Good, the innate and un- 
dying thirst for unbounded happiness. It neutralizes in us the 
power of the laws of nature which would keep us chained to this 
earth; it lifts us into a higher and purer sphere; it leads us be- 
yond the ordinary conditions of humanity, and, to express in a new 
word the new existence into which it initiates us, it transhuman- 


ates us.2. Weare mere defective mites, but one day, when our 





1 Convito, iv., 22: By these three women may be understood the three 
sects of the active life, namely, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripa- 
tetics, who go to the sepulchre, that is, to the present world which is the 
receptacle of corruptible things, and ask for the Saviour, that is to say, 
beatitude, and do not find Him, but they do find a youthin white garments, 
who...is our nobility which comes from God... and he says to eacn one 
of these sects, that is, to whomsoever goes seeking beatitude in the active 
life, that it is not here .. . ete.—Cf. Plato, Epinomis.—St. Thomas, la, 2a, 
q. 3, art. 8. 

2 Paradiso, iv., 42; xxxiii., 10.—Ibid., ii., 7, and i., 24. 

The con-created and perpetual thirst 
For the realm deiform did bear us on, 
As swift almost as ye the heavens behold... 
To represent transhumanise in words 
{mpossible were. ... 
Cf. Boethius, lib. iv., metr. 1.—St. Bonaventura, Jtin. mentis ad Deum 


226 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


formation is completed, we shall be given wings wherewith to fly 
toward the supreme good. We are as creeping worms, but these 
worms will develop into angelic butterflies. ? 

2. If science is the sovereiyn beatitude of the intelligence, it 
cannot fail to attract all men by arousing in them the insatiable 
desire of knowing, and, on the other hand, it must satisfy this 
need by spreading itself abroad without being exhausted, giving 
itself to all without suffering division. It cannot then allow it- 
self to be acquired except on the condition of being in turn com- 
munieated; thus it gives rise to two species of the exercise of 
thought—study and teaching.* Now, study and teaching, to 


attain their purpose, have need of a direction which long habit 





1 Purgatorio, x., 42. 
Do ye not comprehend that we are worms, 
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly 
That flieth unto judgment without screen ? 
Why floats aloft your spirit high in air ? 
Like are ye unto insects undeyeloped, 
Eyen as the worm in whom formation fails! 
2 Paradiso, ii., 4. 
Ye other few who have the neck uplifted 
Betimes to th’ bread of Angels upon which 
One liveth here and grows not sated by it... 
Convito, i., 1.—Cf. Aristot.. Metaphys.. 1. St. Dionysius the Areopagite, de 


Oolesti Hierarchia, vis 


In the Thirteenth Century. 22 


alone can give them. The habits which direct thought receive 
the name of intellectual virtues. They have their reward in the 
possession of the truth to which they lead; the more sublime the 
truths, the sweeter and more precious is their possession. Thus 
the few and incomplete notions which we can have of invisible 
things, give rise to more joy in the human mind than the profuse 
and certain information which we obtain through the senses.’ 
We have elsewhere mentioned the discouragements and _ illu- 
sions which appear to deprive us of access to philosophical truths. 
We must not forget the wonderful assistance which causes us to 
triumph over these obstacles: the sudden flashes of light illumin- 
ing the darkened understanding, the inspirations reviving the ex- 
hausted imagination, and that power which is manifested in 
certain persons, unexpected, impersonal, irresistible, which men 
have thought descended directly from heaven, witness the name 
which they have given to it, genius.? 

3. To the need of knowing, corresponds the need of loving. 
Or rather, the same germ of love, which by a wise intellectual cul- 
ture turns toward the true, when compassed about with a wise 


moral culture, will be directed toward that which is good.2 A 


} Convito, iv. 17; ii.,3. Cf.—Intellectual Virtues, Aristot., Ethics, ii., 1: 





vi., passtm. 
2 See above, Paradiso, xxii., 38.—Inferno, ix., 22, ete. 


3 Convito, iv., 22.—Cicero, Tuscul., iii. 


228 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


providential initiative is exerted within us unknown to ourselves; 
it is shown by felicitous dispositions varying with the ages of life. 
Adolescence has for its own, obedience and sweetness, modesty 
and beauty: modesty, which comprises humility, purity, and 
shame; beauty, which consists in the proportion and healthful- 
ness of all the parts of the body, in their fidelity in conveying the 
impressions of the soul, in corresponding to its impulses. The 
ornaments of youth are tenderness, courtesy, loyalty, temperance, 
and strength. We may say that the last two are the bridle and 
the spur which reason employs in governing the appetites, as the 
rider governs a generous steed. Old age is the time when the la- 
borious acquisitions of past years are to be communicated: it 
is the hour when the rose opens and sheds abroad its perfume. 
The qualities proper to it are: prudence, justice, beneficence, and 
affability. Finally, the last age rests in aserene and pious expec- 
tation of death, ina grateful remembrance of past days, in an 
affectionate aspiration toward God, who is very near. Thus far 


we have enumerated only the simple dispositions which may be 


found innate inthe soul. But, on the one hand, if they have 
not been thus deposited as seed, they may be engrafted by educa- 


tion.? And on the other, the will must co-operate to insure their 





1 Convito, iv., 24-28. 
2 Convito, iv., 21, 22. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 229 


blossoming and their definitive fructification. By repeated acts 
it makes them pass from the state of simple dispositions to the 
state of habits. Now, a habit of the will which causes the proper 
means to be selected between opposing excesses, constitutes that 
in which consists virtue.! ~ We may count eleven moral virtues: 
courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, the 
moderate love of public charges, mansnetude, affability, veracity, 
amenity, and finally, justice.* 

We may again, in accordance with a still more renowned class- 
ification, distinguish the Cardinal and the Theological virtnes. 
The former are four in number: prudence, justice, fortitude, and 
temperance. These have their root in nature, and their recom- 
pense in the happiness of this life. They then have existed 
among men of every time—the precursors of revelation, preparing 
the way before it. The three other virtues, unknown to those 


who have not been visited by revelation, descended from heaven 





1 Convito, iv., 17. Cf. Aristot., Ethics, ii., 6. St. Thomas, 1a 2, q. 134, 
art. 3. 
2 Convito, iv., 17. Cf. Aristot., Ethies, iii., 6; iv., passim. 


3 Purgatorio, xxix., 44. 
Upon the left hand four made holiday 
Vested in purple, following the measure 
Of one of them with three eyes in her head. 
Paradiso, x., xiy., xviii., xxi., passim. De Monarchia, iii. Coavito 


iv., 22.—Cf. Plato, Laws, 1.—Cicero, De Officiis, 1. 


230 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


in company with revelation, and they will one day return whence 
they came. These are, faith, hope, and charity.! 

Faith may be defined, the substance of things hoped for, the evi- 
dence of things not seen: the substance, for they have for us in 
this world no other reality than that which our belief gives to 
them ; and the evidence, because these beliefs become the essential 
premises of every ulterior syllogism.? Hope is the certain expec- 
tation of future reward, based upon the knowledge of the goodness 
of God, and on the consciousness of a sincere effort made to corres- 


pona with assistance received.* And last comes charity, the love 





. Purgatorio, xxix., 41; xxxi.,37. De Monarchia. iii.—Cf.on the Seyen 
Virtues, Hugh of St. Victor, Sermo 39, and St. Thomas, prima, secunds, q. 
61-62. 

2 Paradiso, xxiy., 22. 

Faith is the substance of the things we hope for, 
And evidence of those that are not seen; * * * 
* * * They exist there only in belief, * * * 
And it behoveth us from this belief 
To reason without having other sight, 
And hence it has the nature of evidence. 
Cf. St. Thomas, prima, secundse, q. 4, 1. 
% Paradiso, xxv., 23. 
Hope, said IJ, is the certain expectation 
Of future glory, which is the effect 
Of grace divine and merit precedent. 


Cf. St. Thomas, prima, secundie, q. 62, 4. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 231 


of that ineffable good which philosophical reasoning and sacred au- 
thority concur in making us recognize as the necessary object of 
our affections; of that living good which runs to meet love, as 
light tends to the body capable of reflecting it; which is multiplied 
by being shared, which gives itself with so much the more effusive- 
ness as it is sought with more ardor, and makes itself be the more 


loved where there are a greater number who love it.' But this 
1 Paradiso, xxvi., 9. 
* * * * By philosophic arguments, 
And by authority that hence descends, 
Such love must needs imprint itself in me; 
For Good, so far as good, When comprehended, 
Doth straight enkindle love, and so much greater 
As more of goodness in itself it holds.... 
Purgatorio, xiv., 29 ; xv., 23. 
That goodness infinite and ineffable 
Which is above there, runneth unto love, 
As to a lucid body comes the sunbeam. 
So much it gives itself as it finds ardor, 
So that as far as charity extends, 
O’er it increases the eternal valor. 
And the more people thitherward aspire, 
More are there to love well, and more they love there, 
And, as a mirror, one reflects the other. 


Cf. St. Bernard, de Deo diligendo.—St. Thomas, secunda secunds, q 


23, q. 45, 2. 


232 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


love, the only one that is equally without jealousy and without 
deception, and the faith and hope accompanying it, all three di- 
vine virtues, are not sparks from an ordinary flame; they are pure 
rays emanating immediately from Him who is the Sun of souls, 
who enlightens and enkindles souls here below, while waiting 
until He shall draw them nearer to Himself and envelop them in 
His glory. This supernatural and gratuitous action ( generating 
and remunerating virtue ), the existence of which we must admit 
if we have seriously examined the mysterious phenomena of the 
moral world, is itself a mystery, and we name it, Grace. ! 
10E 

1. In the beginning, the whole species was contained ina single 
man; and the perfections which have been described were united 
in the first father, the type of the human race of which he was 
to be the progenitor. Also, the almighty power that created him 
endowed him with all the science that a soul set in a vessel 
of flesh could contain. This exuberant thought felt the need of 
producing itself exteriorly : he required a means of expression, in- 
telligible to the mind and transmissible by the senses. This ne- 


cessity engendered language. The primitive language, created 








1 Purgatorio, viii., 32.—Paradiso, x., 29; xxviii., 37. 
The radiance of grace, by which is kindled 
True love, and Which thereafter grows by loving. 


St. Thomas, prima, secunde, q. 110, 1. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 233 


with the first soul, was perfect, as was that soul: man called all 
creatures by their names, the said uames being not arbitrary 
terms, but words bearing with them their own definition. 1 After 
the fall, science and the primitive language were both lost; the 
idioms, abandoned to the caprices of the divers races, varied and 
renewed themselves like the leaves of the forest. Only, as the 
first word, the root of the original language, had been a movement 
toward God, indeed, the very name of God (El), so is the root of 
the fallen tongues an interjection expressing grief. (Hew!) ? Thus 
have we seen systems and schools multiplied, having nothing in 
common but their inadequacy. The plenitude of science could be 
refound nowhere save in a man in whom human nature should be 


renewed and uplifted: it dwelt in the sacred breast that was 





1 Paradiso, xiii., 13. 
Into that bosom, thou believest, whence 
Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek, 
Whose taste to all the world is costing dear,... 
Whate’er of light it has to human nature 
Been lawful to possess, was all infused. 

Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 62.—Dante, in the Paradiso, 
Xxvi., 42-44, supposes the natural origin of language and the extinction of 
the primitive tongue. On the contrary, in the book, de Vulgari Elo- 
quentia, he presumes that the first language was created with man, and 
that that language was Hebrew, lib. i., 3-d. 


2 Paradiso, xxvi., 45. De Vulgari Eloquentia, lib. i, 4. 


234 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


pierced on Calvary by the lance of a soldier.!_ Thence it was to 
be diffused among the sages of the sanctuary, the Fathers and 
Doctors of the Church, within that Catholic School where so 
many noble minds were to meet and to follow one another. Such 
were Dionysius the Areopagite, he who with his mortal eyes 
penetrated the most deeply into celestial things; Boethius, who, 
on the eve of martyrdom, unveiled, and at the same time consoled, 
all the miseries hidden beneath the illusions of this world; Isidore, 
Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Anselm, Bernard, Peter Damian; Peter 
the Lombard, who said that he accounted himself happy to be 
able to cast his Sentences, like the widow’s mite, into the treasury 
of the temple; Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, who showed 
themselves in their contemplations to be something more than 
mere thoughtful men. Such were again, in times nearer to our 
own, Peter the Spaniard and Albert the Great; Bonaventura, who 
bore with him into the functions of an active ministry the lofty 
mental absorption of Christian wisdom ; and Thomas of Aquino, 
whose name is above all our praise. ? 

2. Providence has not done less for the realm of justice than 
for that of truth. Law is one of the forms of Good ; and as Good 
dwells in God Himself, and God wills above all else the perman- 


ence of His own being, He wills law. Now, since all that is 





1 Paradiso, xiii., 14. 


2 Paradiso, x., 34-45; xii., 43-47. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 225 


>) 


x 


willed by Him is one thing with His will, we must conclude that 
Law, in its essence, is the divine will. In its temporal realization 
here below, Law is the conformity of contingent facts with His 
Immutable will. In fine, if we take the word in its most 
restricted signification, Law is the sum of the relations real (of 
property) and personal, of man to man, on the observance of 
which social order depends.! 

Man, in fact, has been placed on the confines of two worlds, as 
the horizon which separates two hemispheres: the world of cor- 


> 


ruptible beings, and the world of incorruptibility.2 Codrdinated 
in a necessary relation to these two worlds, he has a twofold 
mission. One is, to realize the entire sum of well-being possible 
in this life; this end is reached by the accomplishing of the pre- 
cepts of philosophy, by the practice of intellectual and moral 
virtues. The other is, to attain to eternal beatitude, and this is 
accomplished by a docile adhesion to the teachings of revelation, 
by the exercise of the theological virtues.* However, this admir- 
able economy would soon be disturbed by rebellious passions, if 


these were not restrained by a judicious curb, and directed by a 


guiding hand, if their impulses were not modified by exterior 





1 De Monarchia, ii.—Cf. St. Thomas, la, 2a, q. 91, 1. 
2 De Monarchia, iii—Cf. de Causis, 2.—st. Bonaventura, Serm. 1, in 


Hexamer. 
3 De Monarchia, iii. 


236 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


circumstances; the curb is Law; the hand, authority; the exterior 
circumstances, society. To the two missions of man correspond 
two kinds of law, of authority, of society; the one temporal, 
and the other spiritual; the organization of these two spheres will 
be more nearly considered.! 

The unity of the human race isa fact placed by all beliefs, an- 
cient or modern, beyond the domain of controversy.2 Hence, 
there is for the human race but one single and common terrestrial 
destination, which is the same as that of each man in particular. 
This destination is, to reduce to act the whole power of intelli- 
gence with which he is endowed, proposing to himself speculation 
as his principal, and practice as his secondary object. Such is the 
all important purpose of civilization entire.*~ From another point 
of view, if man is essentially social, if the need of living in society 
groups individuals into families, families into cities, and cities 


into nations, the same need draws together the nations among 








1 De Monarchia, iii.—Purgatorio, xvi., 32. 


Hence it behoved laws for a rein to place, 
Behoved a king to have, who at the least 
Of the true city should discern the tower. 
The laws exist, but who sets hand to them ? 
Convito, iv., 9.—Cf. St. Thomas, prima, secunde, q. 95, 1. 
2 Convito, iv., 15. 


3 De Monarchia, 1, 


In the Thirteenth Century. 237 


themselves. This drawing together, left to the ambition of prin- 
cesand the caprices of fortune, becomes collision: this is the 
origin of war; and war implies both the absence and the import- 
ance of.some legal order that may peacefully unite the nations to 
make of them one universal society. ' The inevitable form of a 
society thus conceived, will be unity ; for unity is to our minds 
the primal constituent of the divine essence in the image of 
which human nature was made; it is the law that presides over 
the government of the world; it is the condition of existence, of 
perfection, of harmony; for again, one single will must govern, 
in order to effect unanimity and consequently peace and concord 
among those who obey. Raised toa degree of power which 
should leave no place for desires or for passions, this single will 
would be constrained to be just, and in turn, would constrain all 
who might show themselves perverse. The rivalries between 
princes and peoples would disappear, a general security would be 
established, under favor of which the intellectual and moral ac- 
tivity of minds would be developed. These inductions of reason- 
ing, confirmed by the authority of the learning of antiquity, by 


Homer and by Aristotle, are still farther supported by the testi- 





1 Paradiso, viii., 40. 
BOGE Would it be worse, 


For men on earth were they not citizens, 
Convito, iv., 4.—Cf. Aristot., Politics, i., 2. 


238 Dante, ana Catholic Philosophy 


mony of Holy Writ. Is not this enough to lead to the conclu- 
sion that a universal monarehy, that is, the dominion of one over 
men and things in the order of time, is necessary to the well- 
being of the world?! 

But who will be the head of this monarchy, and who can claim 
the right of imposing it upon men? By recognizing Law as the 
divine will, and the invisible thoughts of God as translated into 
visible characters in His works, we have only to look through 
history to find signs of the providential vocation which led a 
privileged race to the empire of the world.* Marvellous signs are 
met with in the history of the Roman people; for it is with peo- 
ples as with men, some are born slayes and others kings. If 
power pertains to nobility, and if nobility in its origin is inter- 
changeable with heroism, what people was more heroic and could 
more truly boast a series of the most virile virtues, from Torqua- 
tus, Cincinnatus, Decius, and Camillus, down to Scipio, Cato, and 
Pompey? If uprightness of inientions, solemnity of declaration, 
moderation in victory, and wisdom in government, can legitimate 
conquests, where can these conditions be more gloriously found ? 
If prodigies be required, occurrences of that sort are not lacking in 


the annals of the city for whose sake bucklers rained dewn from 





1 Gonvito, iv., 4.—De Monarchia, lib. i., entire.—St. Thomas, de Regim. 
Princip., lib. i., cap. i., 2. 
2 De Monarchia, lib. ii., in princ.—Convito, iv., 4. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 239 


heaven, and birds watched while its proper defenders slept. If 
there be a judgment of God in the result of competitions and 
combats, Rome struggled for the empire of the nations with 
Assyria, Egypt, Persia, andGreece ; she left them all behind her ; 
she fought, as if in a judicial duel, against Carthage. Spain, Gaul, 
and Germany, and she bore away the honors of the field. Finally, 
if a yet more august sanction be requisite, He who was the ex- 
pectation of the earth, and who Himself waited to appear until 
the earth should be ready for Him, He who came to offer a le- 
gitimate satisfaction for the iniquities of all time, and who could 
accomplish this only by undergoing a legal chastisement, the Son of 
God, came at the moment when the world was resting in a general 
submission to the Roman power. He accepted the condemnation, 
the authority. of a Roman judge, delegated by a Cesar. As one 
Cesar was the minister of divine retribution on the person of the 
Man-God, so was another C:esar to be the instrument of that 


which was to descend upon the deicide people.! From Czesar to 





! Paradiso, vi., 12-32. 
Behold how great a power has made it worthy 
Of reverence, beginning from the hour 
When Pallas died to give it sovereignty.... 
Torquatus thence and Quipctius, who from locks 
Unkempt was named, Decii and Fabii, 


Received the fame I willingly embalm.... 


240 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Ceesar the sovereign vocation was to descend to Constantine, and 
from Justinian to pass over to Charlemagne: universal monarchy, 
regenerated by Christianity, receiving with a new name anew 
existence, was to become the Holy Roman Empire.! 

Now, the Holy-Empire, founded for the temporal well-being of 
men, having its reason for existence in the necessities of social 
life, which in turn find their reason in the corresponding laws of 
physical nature, thus goes back, without intermediary, to the very 
Author of nature. It has its place in the plan of creation, it has 
been realized through a series of providential events, it holds 


from God alone. 2 


555006 The living Justice that inspires me 

Granted it...... 

The glory of doing yengeance for its wrath.... 
Later it ran with Titus to do vengeance 

Upon the vengeance of the ancient sin. 

Conyito, iv., 4. Ibid., cap. v.—De Monarchia, lib. ii., entire.—Cf. St. 
Thomas, de Regim. Princip.., iii., 4, and following. 

1 Paradiso, vi., 1-4 ; 31. 

And when the tooth of Lombardy had bitten 
The Holy Church, then underneath its wings 
Did Charlemagne victorious succor her. 

* De Monarchia, lib. iii. And since the disposition of this world follows 
the disposition of the celestial spheres, it is necessary in order that the 
salutary instructions of liberty and peace may be suitably adopted to times 
and places, that tbis terrestrial ruler be inspired by Him, who directly 
beholds the entire disposition of the heavens. Thiscan only be He who or- 
dained that disposition... And if this be so, God alone elects, God alone 


confirms. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 241 


And yet, monarchical authority, even while thus independent, 
has its limitations. The social order exists agi in the interest of 
the human race: they who obey the law were not created for the 
good pleasure of the lawgiver: on the contrary, the lawgiver was 
made for their needs. It is an incontestable axiom that the mon- 
arch is to be considered as the servant of all.' Hence power in 
public affairs ceases to be at the service of a small number of men, 
of such namely as claim superiority under title of nobility. It is 
this very title which must now be examined. Nobility, if we heed 
the opinion of its scions, consists in descent from a long series of 
opulent ancestors. But we can recognize no rights conferred by 
riches, which may be triply despicable, through the miseries at- 
tached to their possession, the dangers attending their increase, 
and the iniquity of their origin. This iniquity becomes manifest, 
whether the said riches are the result of blind chance or of culpa- 
ble trickery, whether they proceed from selfish labors wherefrom 
every generous thought has been excluded, or whether they have 
been transmitted in the ordinary course of succession. For the 
order of legal succession is by no means identical with the legiti- 


mate order of reason, which would eall to the inheritance of the 


1 De Monarchia, ii. Secundem legem viventes non ad legislatorem, 
ordinantur, sed magis ille ad hos... Monarcha minister omnium procul 


dubio habendus est. Cf. St. Thomas, prima, secunde, q. 96, 4. 


242 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


property of the deceased only the heir of his virtues.1_ And again, 
if the rights of the nobles spring from the long series of genera- 
tions to which they can point, reason and faith re-conduct all 
generations to the feet of a first father, and, either all generations 
were ennobled in his person, or, in that person were stricken by a 
perpetual plebeianism. Thus the existence of a hereditary nobil- 
ity pre-supposes the inequality, the primitive multiplicity, of the 
races of men, and hence aims a blow at Christian doctrine. ? True 
nobility, for every being, is that perfection, within the limits ofits 
nature, to which it may attain: for man in particular, it is the 
sum of felicitous dispositions of which the germs have been plant- 
ed in his nature by the hand of God—which germs, cultivated 
by a persevering will, become ornaments, talents, virtues. He 
from whom they emanate varies them according to the diversity 


of functions needful for social life: to some he gives words for 





1 Conyito, Canzone 3, lib. iv.—Ibid. iv., 11, 12, 13. ‘* Might it have 
pleased God....that he who does not inherit the excellence, should lose 
the inheritance of the property !?*....Cf. on Riches, Cicero, Paradox., 1. 
—Boethius, lib. ii., metr. 2, 5. 

2 Conyito, iv., 14,15. Cf. St. Thomas, De Erudit. Princip., i., 4.—St. 
Bonaventura, Serm. iii., Domin. 12, post Pentecost.; Serm. i., de S. 
Martino. 

3 Convito, iv., 16, 19, 20. De Monarchia, ii.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, loc. 


cit. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 243 


counselling, to others the energy to issue commands, and again to 
others the unquestiontmg courage required to execute such com- 
mands: thence, inequality among men. God then implants within 
us such qualities as may please Him, employing, as means, celes- 
tial influences—such influences acting under His hand as a seal 
to stamp the wax of our nature. These influences which, making 
no distinctions, visit houses illustrious or obscure, correct. the ef- 
fect of the laws of generation, which otherwise would cause chil- 
dren to present the exact image of their father; they interrupt 
the succession of characters in families; they ought also to inter- 
rupt the claim to suecession in regard to public honors. ! It was 
necessary that man should not find within himself hereditary 
merits, in order that he might seek to make for himself new ones 
by labor, and that by prayer he might ask for them. 2 Functions 


therefore ought to be personal, as are vocations: nature and for- 








1 Paradiso, viii., 40. 
And can they be so, if below they live not 
Diversely unto offices diverse ? 
No, if your master writeth well for you. 
-..-.. Therefore it behoves 
The roots of your effeets to be diverse. 
Hence one is Solon born, another Xerxes. 
Cf. Aristot., Polities, i.,5, 6. 


2 Purgatorio, vii., 41. 


244 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tune, so often contradictory in their gifts, ought to be set in ac- 

cord. The prosperity of the world depends on the proper solution 
of this problem. ' We cannot deny the continuance of the same 
virtues in a small number of illustrious families. But then it is 
the collective sum of the virtues of each one that makes the glory 
of all. Nobility is like a mantle, which the shears of time 
would speedily shorten, did not each generation add something to 
its length.? 

Temporal society conceived in this way cannot be completely 
realized here below. But the poet finds the type of his concep- 
tions in a better world than this. Heaven lies open before him; 
he contemplates the souls of the just who had previously occupied 
destructible thrones, now gathered together in a royalty without 
end. He sees them forming of their glories, grouped together, 


these words, written in letters of fire, as the fundamental law of 








1 Paradiso, viii., 47. 
Evermore nature, if it fortune find 
Discordant to it, like each other seed, 
Out of its region, maketh evil thrift, ete. 
Convito, iv., 11. 
2 Convito, iv., 29.—Paradiso, xvi., 3. 
Truly thou art a cloak that quickly shortens, 
So that unless we piece thee day by day, 


Time goeth round about thee with his shears. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 245 


political communities: Diligite justitiam, qui judicatis terram. 
Then the letter M remains alone, crowned with a flaming aureole, 
the initial and the symbol of monarchy. A last transformation 
displays, in place of the M, the eagle, the bird of God, the emblem 
of the Holy Roman Empire.! 7 

Parallel with universal monarchy, by means of which all terres- 
trial interests may be regulated, rises the universal Church, 
through which the religious destinies of mankind are to be accom- 
plished. The Church can pretend to no suzerainty over the 
Empire; she had no part in its establishment, and no legal title 
authorizes her to require its homage. She cannot make to herself 
a kingdom of this world without running counter to her very 
constitution and acting in a manner contrary to the example of 
Christ, which is the immutable type of her conduct. 

Another and a worthier empire belongs to her, that of eternity ; 
she is the depositary of the divine teachings, which surpass all the 
works of reason; she is enriched by the graces which cause the ger- 
mination of virtues beyond the sphere of nature : Catholic, she em- 
braces more nations than any secular society ever joined together. 
She too is monarchical; for amid so great a multitude and variety 
of men, harmony would be constantly disturbed by the impetuos- 


ity of human wills, were it not for the guiding and moderating 





1 Paradiso, xviii., 30-37. 


246 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


intervention of the sovereign Pontiff.' It was to prepare a seat 
for this necessary pontificate that God set His own hand to the 
foundation of Rome and of the Roman power.” This is why the 
city of Romulus was made a holy place, why the stones of its 
walls are worthy of respect, and the ground upon which it stands 
is worthy of more honor than men can well speak.* It was above 
the horizon of the seven hills that, in the lapse of many centuries, 


the two suns arose: the imperial sun, enlightening the way of 








1 De Monarchia, iii. ....*‘ These two beatitudes....we reach by differ- 
ent means....nevertheless, human cupidity would set them aside, were 
not men, like horses, restrained in their vagabond brutishness by some 
bridle. Whence it was necessary for man to have two directions, in ac- 
cordance with the two ends proposed ; that of the supreme Pontiff, who 
should in accordance with Revelation, direct the generations of men to 
spiritual felicity ; and that of the emperor, who, in accordance with the 
teachings of philosophy, should direct men to temporal felicity.” 

Paradiso, v., 26. 

Ye have the Old and the New Testament, 
And the Pastor of the Church who guideth you, 
Let this suffice you unto your salvation. 

St. Thomas la, 22, q. 112. 2. 

2 Inferno, ii., 8. 

The which and what, wishing to speak the truth 
Were ’stablished as the holy place, wherein 
Sits the successor of the greatest Peter. 

3 Convito, iv., 5. ** Hence we can ask no more to enable us to see what 
a special birth, a special process thought out and ordained by God, was 
that of the holy city. And certainly I am of settled opinion that the 
stones standing in its walls are worthy of reverence, and that the soil 
whereon it is seated is worthy beyond all that has been predicated and 
proved,” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 247 


this life, and the sun of the papacy, illuminating the way leading 
to heaven. We have seen these two stars, quitting their proper 
orbits, clash one against the other, and we have thought them 
eclipsed.’ We have witnessed the struggles awaiting the soldiers 
of Christ in this world, and the disorder introduced into their 
ranks, notwithstanding the efforts made by their eternal Head to 
rally them around Himself.” The city of God cannot then expect 
to reach its complete realization under the laws of time. The true 
Rome, says the poet, is the Rome of which Christ is a Roman; 
the typical society is that of which Christ is the visible Superior. 
He who would comprehend the vicissitudes of the Church in its 


present struggles, must previously consider it in its triumph. * 


Il. 


1. Beyond the celestial spheres wherein the stars revolve, be- 





1 Purgatorio, xvi., 36. 
Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was 
Two suns to have, which one road and the other, 
Of God and of the world, made manifest. 
One has the other quenched.... 
2 Paradiso, xii., 13. 
3 Purgatorio, xxxii., 34. 
....That Rome where Christ is Roman. 
Ibid., xxvi., 42. 
-.++.The cloister 
Wherein is Christ the abbot of the college. 


248 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


yond the ninth heaven, which envelops the others within its vast 


vortex, is found the empyrean heaven, pure light, intellectual light 
filled with love, love of the true good, source of all joy, joy which 
transcends all imaginable delights.1 This place is the common 
abode of souls purified by the trials of this life or by the expiations 
which follow it. If we sometimes imagine them placed at nnequal 
heights among the innumerable orbs that throng the firmament, 
this image, which takes its measure from the weakness of the 
human mind, has no other object than to make us understand the 
inequality of their rewards as proportioned to the inequality of 
their merits. They themselves feel the justice of this proportion- 
ment, and the knowledge which they possess of it becomes a 
constituent element of their felicity. For the love that renders 
them happy makes their wills enter into the circle of the divine 
will, where they lose themselves as in an ocean. Thus, under 
differing conditions, each soul finds the term of its desires, that is, 
the sum of all the happiness of which it is capable; from the very 


ee el 


1 Paradiso, xxx., 13, 
++seeeThe heaven that is pure light, 
Light intellectual replete with Jove, 
Love of true good replete with ecstasy, 


Ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness, 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 249 


diversity of the benetits received, results an admirable concert in 
praise of the Remunerator. ! 

2. According to the law prevailing in the three kingdoms of 
the invisible world by which the temporary absence of the body 
is made good, the blessed souls are clad in sensible forms. These 
forms shine with a marvellous brightness, always proportioned to 
the greatness of the virtues which it crowns. The first are 
merely veils of light; then come glowing flames, incandescent 
stars ; all that is material has become spiritualized, so to speak: 
we may not call these, shades, but glories, lives, loves.? Here, 
in fact, the organs have ceased to be the necessary servants of 


the intelligence; thought is interchanged without the aid of lan- 


1 Paradiso, iy., 13; iii., 24. 
‘Brother, our will is quieted by virtue 
Of charity, that makes us wish alone 
For what we have, nor gives us thirst for more. 
If to be more exalted we aspired, 
Discordant would our aspirations be 
Unto the will of Him who here secludes us; .... 
Nay, ’tis essential to this blest existence 
To keep itself within the will divine, 
Whereby our very wishes are made one ;... 
And his will is our peace; this is the sea 
To which is moving onward whatsoever 
It doth create, and all that nature makes.” 
Then it was clear to me how every where 
In heaven is Paradise, although the grace 
Of good supreme there rain not in one measure. 
Convito, iii., 15.—Paradiso, vi., £9, 41. 
2 Paradiso, iii., 8; v., 36; viii., 7; x., xxi., ete., passim. 


250 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


guage ; it no longer knows the obstacles placed by time and space 
in the way of its explorations; the future is for it like unto the 
past: it can thus, without hindrance, bend itself down from the 
heights of heaven to the lowly globe on which it once dwelt. ! 
Hence, the memories of the earth, and above all, the holy affec- 
tions there formed, are not effaced in the souls that have left it 
fora better home. They cast down upon us compassionate 
glances, they serve as interpreters and intercessors with the Al- 
mighty, who in turn makes them His ministers. They are chan- 
nels by means of which prayer may ascend, and grace may de- 
scend.? 

But these are, so to speak, the accessory circumstances of be- 
atitude; we must penetrate into its very essence. If beatitude 
supposes the impossibility of the existence of any ulterior desire, 
it is attainable by the human being only in the complete perfec- 
tion and satisfaction of his human faculties. Now, of these fac- 
ulties, reason is that which rules over all the rest; reason can 
bé satisfied only in the contemplation of truth, and all truth re- 


poses within the Divine mind. Hence, beatitude consists in the 





1 Paradiso, xy., 19, 31. St. Thomas, prima, q. 89, 7, 8.—St. Gregory, 
Moral., xii., 13. 


2 Paradiso, xiv., 22. Intercession of the Saints, xxi., 21. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 251 


vision of God.' It is there, in that boundless mirror, that the 
elect perceive, a one single and unchangeable perspective, all 
that has been, is, or is to be, even the first conception and desire, 
before the word that manifests and the deed that realizes. Their 
sight penetrates to greater depths in proportion as they merit 
more.® The act by which they see, is then the basis, and, as it 
were, the matter of their felicity ; the act by which they love, is 
its form: the eternal decrees, as they make themselves known, 


are accepted and accomplished. * As intuition pertains to the un- 








1 Paradiso, xxviii., 36. 
From this it may be seen how blessedness 
Is founded in the faculty which sees, 
And not in that which loves, and follows next; 
And of this seeing merit is the measure. 
Convito, iii., 15. Hpist dedic. ad Can. Grand in fine.—Cf. St. Thomas, 
1a, 2e, q. 3, 4. 
2 Vision in God, Paradiso, vViii., 31; ix., 21, 25; xi.,7; xv., 21; xxi., 30; 
xxix., 3.—Knowledge of the future, passim, but especially xvii., 5: 
.... Even as minds terrestrial perceive 
No triangle containeth two obtuse, 
So thou behboldest the contingent things 
Ere in themselves they are, fixing thine eyes 
Upon the point in which all times are present. 
Cf. Cicero, Somnium Scipionis. 


3 Paradiso, iii., 27. See above. 


252 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


derstanding, delectation pertains to the will; thus beatitude 
(knowledge and love) is the state of man raised to its highest 
power. From another point of view, beatitude is God Himself 
giving Himself to be possessed. Man and God, the subject and 
the object, touch one another, but are not confounded together ; 
the finite subsists distinct in the presence of the infinite. 

2. But aday is to come when the blissful uniformity of the 
existence of the saints will experience a change. On that day, 
they will retake their clothing of flesh, glorified. Their person, 
thus re-established in its primitive integrity, will be more agree- 
able to the Creator: in return, He will measure out to them His 
graces in still greater abundance. The clearness of their vision 
will thence be heightened, while the interior glow which that 
clearness maintains, will increase, as will also the exterior irra- 
diation which must be its necessary consequence. As the incan- 
descent coal in the flame, so will the resuscitated bodies appear 


within their aureoles.! Then, the guests invited to the banquet 





1 Paradiso, xiv., 15. 
When, glorious and sanctified, our flesh 
Is reassumed, then shall our persons be 
More pleasing by their being all complete; 
For will increase what e’er bestows on us 
Of light gratuitous the Good Supreme, 
Light which enables us to look on Him ; 
Therefore the vision must perforce increase, 
Increase the ardor which from that is kindled, 
Increase the radiance which from this proceeds. 
Cf. St. Augustine, de Civ. Dei.—St. Thomas, Contr. Gent., iv., 79.—St. 
Bonaventura, Compend., Vii., 28, 29. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 253 


of eternal life having taken their places, that festival will begin 
which knows no morrow. 

To depict this festival, the poet has gathered together the 
most lovely and ravishing colors. He sees in the midst of the 
Empyrean a vast reservoir of light, extending in a circular form, 
and reflecting the splendors of the divine glory; around, rise, 
as in an amphitheatre, shining thrones, whereon are seated, clad 
in white garments, the teeming ranks of the blessed. This as- 
semblage is comparable to a white rose whose innumerable leaves 
lie open: joy and praise are the perfumes rising from its corolla. 
Angels with golden wings, like swarms of bees, descend within 
the bosom of the glorious flower, and then ascend toward the 
Eternal Sun, the rays from which their multitude in no way in- 
tereepts. He alone, in fact, satisfies and holds fast the contem- 
plations and affections of these myriads of spirits, an Orb never 
veiled by any cloud, with no setting and no winter-time, untouched 
by the laws of creation established by Himself. 

Ve 


1, In accompanying human nature to heights where it thus 





1 Paradiso, xxx., 33; xxxi., passim. 
O splendor of God! by means of which I saw 
The lofty triumph of the realm yeracious, 
Give me the power to say how it I saw! 


There is a light above, etc. 


254 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


hecomes transfigured, we are led to recognize the existence of 
natures of a higher order; if we admit that the works of God 
cannot be surpassed in magnificence by the imagination of man, 
it is enough to be able to conceive of possible myriads of spirit- 
ual creatures in order to conclude that they really are! Thus 
their existence and their functions have been divined by men 
in all ages, although imperfectly demonstrated, as the light of day 
makes its presence felt in eyes that are still closed. The pagans 
called them Gods; Plato named them Ideas; in the ordinary 
language of Christians they are the Angels: philosophers prefer 
to call them Intelligences.? Faith has rent the veil separating 
us from these excellent creatures. Distributed through the 
universe, with which they came into being because they were 
to maintain in it order and life, their number is as great as is 
their perfection.? Their understanding, fixed.in the constant 
vision of the truth, does not know the alternations of forgetful- 
ness and remembrance which are our portion. The illuminating 
grace merited by their fidelity in the day of temptation, forever 


confirms their will (which never ceases to be free) in the habit 





* Convito, ii., 5. 

2 Convito, ii., 5: ‘* Plato calls them ideas, which is as much as to say 
universal forms and natures.’”’—Cf. Brucker, Hist. critic., in Platone. 

3 Paradiso, xxix., 18, 44.—Cf. St. Dionysius the Areopagite, de Colesti 


Hierarch., xiv. 


In the Tharteenth Century. 255 


of justice.’ In them, power is not distinguished from act; pure 
act constitutes their mode of being; they are intelligence, they 
are love.2 Nevertheless, unequal among themselves, they are 
divided into three hierarchies, of which each one is subdivided 
into three orders. To each hierarchy is attributed the special 
contemplation of one of the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity ; 


to each order a different poiut of view; each Divine Person being 








1 Paradiso, xxix., 20-26. 
On which account their vision was exalted 
By the enlightening grace and their own merit, 
So that they have a full and steadfast will.... 
These substances, since in God's countenance 
They jocund were, turned not away their sight 
From that wherefrom not anything is hidden; 
Hence they have not their vision intercepted 
By object new, and hence they do not need 
To recollect, through interrupted thought. 
Paradiso, xxi., 30. 
.... Love unfettered in this court sufficeth 
To follow the eternal Providence. 
Cf. S. Dionys. Areop., de Divin. Nomin., iv. 
2 Paradiso, xxix., ll. 
S00anr And summit of the world 
Were those wherein the pure act was produced. 


Paradiso, xxiii., 35, 


250 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


capable of being considered in Itself, or in its relations to the tws 
Others.!. To these comtempiative functions corresponds an aci- 
ive ministry. The nine choirs of angels (for this number nine, 
the square of three, has a mysterious signification) * are the 
motors of the nine heavenly spheres: they communicate to theni 
a swiftness proportioned to the fervor which has been enkindled 
within themselves: by this means they intervene in all the phe- 
nomena of the physical world.* But their action is by preference 
exerted in the moral world. From them spring, and upon the 
model of their hierarchy are constructed, the nine degrees of 
the human sciences.4 Through their care the seeds of virtue 
are deposited and developed in souls. Ifin the jovs of Paradise 
they are confounded with the blessed, in Purgatory they show 


themselves as judges, guardians, consolers of the suffering just, 








1 Paradiso, xxviii., 9-32. Convito, ii.,6. Cf. St, Dionys., de Calesti 
Hierach. yi., ix.—St. Thomas, prima, q. 108. 

2 Vita Nuova, passim. Dante finds this number appearing in the 
most soul-stirring circumstances of his youth : nine years and eighteen, 
were the two epochs whicti brought him near to Beatrice: when he lost 
her, he was close upon his twenty-seyenth year.—Cf. Hugh of St. Victor, 
Erudit, didascal., ii., 5. 

3 Paradiso, ii., 42; viii.,13, 29; ix., 21, ete. Convito, ii., 5.—Cf. Plate, 
Epinomis, Timeeus.—St. Thomas, q. 110, art. 1. 


4 Convito, ii., 14, 15.—Cf. St. Bonaventura, Serm. xxii., in Hexamer. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 257 


Their formidable appearance when sent to chastise the inso- 
lence of the demons, illumines the darkness of Hell. They en- 
counter the same enemies, and combat them with more equal 
chances, on the earth, where the salvation or the loss of souls 
inakes the subject-matter in dispute.’ Even the passing inter- 
ests of life are not left to accident, as we in our ignorance pre- 
sume. He who created spirits to move the heavens, and to make 
an equal light shine upon every part of the globe, also established 
an intelligence that should dispense temporal glories, and arrange 
that, in spite of human precautions and foresight, the goods of 
this world should pass from family to family, and from nation 
to nation. This intelligence provides judges, and governs with 
the same wisdom as do the other spirits, her compeers ; as happy 
as they, she turns the sphere confided to her care, and takes 
pleasure in its motion. She heeds not the blasphemies of those 
who ought to praise her, and who malign her under the name of 
Fortune.? Thus, every place and every being, even all the cir- 
1 Paradiso, xxxi., Passim. Purgatorio, viii., 32.,ix., 26, and Passim.— 
Inferno, ix., 29.—Purgatorio, y., 36.—Cf. St. Thomas, prima, q. 112. 
2 Inferno, Vii., 25-82. 
This is she who is so execrated 
Even by those who ought to give her praise, 
Giving her blame amiss, and bad repute. 
But she is blissful, and she heeds it not ; 
Among the other primal creatures gladsome 


She turns her sphere, and blissful she rejoices. 
Cf. Aristot., Physics, ii., 4. Boethius, i., iv., pros. 7. 





258 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


cumstances of tlicir existence, life and death, all things, have 
their angels, representatives of the divine omnipresence. 

2. One step still remains to be taken, and the intellectual pil- 
grimage nears itsend. But thatstepis an immense one: between 
the uppermost heights of the finite, and the Infinite, between the 
loftiest creatures and their Creator, stretches an abyss, to cross 
which requires not only all the combined powers of reason and 
faith, but even more. 

The worlds that we have traversed show forth the admirable 
art which called them into being. Even on the gates of Hell we 
have seen the imprint of power, wisdom, and love. The heavens, 
revolving over our heads. exhibit to us their endless beauties, as 
if to invite us to recognize the Worker who fashioned them. The 
universal movement bearing along the firmament supposes an 
immovable prime motor acting on matter by the force of moral at- 
traction.’ Besides, given, the most obscure being in nature, it 
must have received its existence from some other being; and this 
latter in turn must exist of itself or through the causation of some 
other. If it exists of itself it is the First Principle; if not, we 
must mount still higher, and multiply indefinitely efficient causes, 


or finally reach some primordial principle, the only being that we 


‘ 





1 Purgatorio, xiv., 50. Paradiso, i., 25,—Cf. Plato. Laws, x.—Aristot., 


Metaph., xii. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 259 


can conceive of as necessary, because from it alone, mediately, or 
immediately, all existences emanate. God then makes Himself 
known by proofs both physical and mataphysical; He has man- 
ifested Himself more fully by pouring forth the celestial dew of 
inspiration upon prophets, evangelists, and apostles.! One in His 
substance, Power, Wisdom, and Love subsist in Him in a trinity of 
persons, so that both the singula: and the plural, in the language 
of men, are applicable to Him.? Heis spirit, He is the indivisible 
centre whither converge all times and all places. He is the cir- 
cle which circumscribes the universe, and which nothing cireum- 


scribes.4 Immense, eternal, immutable, He is the primal truth 





or 


1 Paradiso, xxiv., 45. 

* * * * In one God I believe, 

Sole and eterne, who moveth all the heavens 

With love and with desire, himself unmoved; 

And of such faith not only have I proofs 

Physical and metaphysical, but gives them 

Likewise the truth that from this place rains down.... 
Epist. ad Can Grand.-—Cf. Aristot.. Metaph., iii. 
? Inferno, iii., 2.—Paradiso, xiv. [bid., xxiy., 47.—Dean Plumptre’s Tr. 

In whom both sunt and est combined we note. 
3 Paradiso, xxix., 4. 

Where centres every where and every when. 
4 Purgatorio, xi., 1. Paradiso, xiy., 10. 

Not circumscribed and all things circumscribing. 


Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, i., 17. 


260 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


outside of which there is nothing but darkness.!. In His thought 
all creatures are to be found foreseen and co-ordinated to their 
end. Even contingent facts are there reflected in advance, without 
thereby becoming necessary. Thus, the glance of the spectator 
on the shore follows the course of the ship on the waters, but 
does not direct it.2. He is also unbounded goodness, and, as the 
sovereign good,? He is the invariable object of His own will, which 
thence becomes the source and the measure of all justice. 

But this justice has depths beyond the limited reach of our reason, 
like to the bottom of a sea which the short’ plummet of the navi- 


gator vainly endeavors to sound.4 Finally, all His attributes, 





1 Paradiso, iv., 32; xix., 82; xxxiii., 23.—Cf. St. Thomas, Prima, q. 16 
5.—Aristot., Metaph., xii. 
2 Paradiso, xvii., 13. 
Contingency, that outside of the volume 
Of your materiality extends not, 
Is all depicted in the eternal aspect. 
Necessity however thence it takes not, 
Except as from the eye, in which "tis mirrored, 
A ship that with the current down descends. 
Cf. Boethius, lib. v., pros. 4, 6.—St. Bonaventura, Compendium, i., 31. 
3 Paradiso, xxvi., 6. Convito, iv., 12.—Cf. Plato, Rep., vi.,—St. Thomas, 
Prima, q. 6, 4. 
4 Paradiso, xix., 29. 
The primal will, that in itself is good, 
Ne’er from itself, the Good Supreme, has moved. 
So much is just as is accordant with it. 
Inferno, xx., 10.—Paradiso, iv., 23; xix., 20; xxxii., 17.—Convito, iv., 
22. Dionys. Areop., de Div. Nomin.—St. Thomas, prima, q. 21. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 261 


raised to the same degree of sovereign perfection, are maintained 
in an indestructible equilibrium ; so that, borrowing the language 
of numbers, it is permissible to define God as the Prima) Equa- 
tion.! 

Such a God, sufficing to Himself in the solitude of His essence, 
would create, not to increase His happiness, but that His glory, 
shining in His works, might witness of itself to itself? In the 
bosom of eternity, outside of all time, without other law than His 
own will, He who is One and Trinal entered into action; Power 
executed what Wisdom designed, and infinite Love, opening itself 
out, manifested itself in new loves.) We may not say that before 
beginning to create He remained inactive; for the words before 
and after are banished from the language of things diyine. Form 
and matter, isolated and combined, were sent forth at the same 
moment, as a triple arrow from a single bow, out of the depths of 
the creative thought; and, with the substahces, was created the 
order suitable to them. Such as are pure forms, as the angels, oc- 
cupied the summit of the created universe; matter occupied the 


lowest regions; between the two, matter and spiritual form were 





1 Paradiso, xv., 25. 
When on you dawned the First Equality. 
Cf. Plato, Phaedo. 


2 Paradiso, x., 1; vVii., 22. 


262 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


united by an indissoluble bond.’ Created things are. the splendor 
of the immutable idea which the Father generates and loves with- 
out end: idea, reason, word, light, which, without separating it- 
self from Him who causes it to glow, without quitting its proper 
unity, shines down from creature to creature, from causes to ef- 
fects, until at length it occasions merely contingent and passing 
phenomena: it is an illumination repeated from mirror to mirror, 
becoming more and more pale as its distance from its Source 


increases.” Thus, there is in everything an ideal and incorruptible 





1 Paradiso, xxix., 5. 

Not to acquire some good unto himself, 
Which is impossible, but that his splendor 
In its resplendency may say, * Subsisto,’ 

In his eternity, outside of time, 
Outside all other limits, as it pleased him, 
Into new Loves the Eternal Love unfolded. 

Nor as if torpid did he lie before; 
For neither after nor before proceeded 
The going forth of God upon those waters. 


Cf. Plato, Timzeus.—St. Thomas, prima, q. 44, 4. 

2 Paradiso, i., 1; xiii., 19. Cary’s Tr. 
* * * * Tat which dies not, 
And that which can die, are but each the beam 
Of that Idea, which our Sovereign Sire 
Engendereth loving; for that lively Light, 
Which passeth from his splendor, not disjoined 
From him, nor from the Love triune with them, 
Doth, through his bounty, congregate itself, 
Mirrored, as ’twere in new existences,* 
Itself unalterable, and ever one, 

Descending hence unto the lowest powers, 

Its energy so sinks, at last it makes 
But brief contingencies. 

Ibid., viii., 35. Longfellow. 


And not alone the natures are foreseen 
Within the mind that in itself is perfect, 
But they together with their preservation. 
Convito.—Cf. Plato, Parmenid., Rep., vi., vii.—Boethius, 1. iii., metre 
9.—St. Thomas, prima, q. 32, 1 
* (Other readings give ** nine subsistences,”’ the nine heayens.—Tr.) 


In the Thirteenth Century. 263 


element; but in all things that come into being subject to de- 
struction, there is also a gross and perishable element. The mat- 
ter which is in them exhibits dispositions and undergoes a variety 
of influences which render it more or less diaphanous to the di- 
vine light, and cause it to yield itself more or less faithfully to 
the seal whose impress it is destined to receive. Thus the im- 
pression becomes blurred or mutilated.! And this imperfection 
lies in the nature of things; for He whose compasses described 
the extremities of the universe, could not have swept a circle 
wide enough to contain His Word. Nature is too narrow to en- 
close the infinite good which alone can be its own measure; it 
could not suffice to realize all the designs of the inexhaustible 
Artist.2. Finally, if it is difficult to comprehend the creation of 
bodies by a God who is pure spirit, we must remember that the 
effect can be contained eminently in the cause, and that the 
character of cause, that is, of spontaneous force, belongs only- to 
a spiritual being. In this sense it has been truly said: Omnis 


intelligentia plena est sormis.® 





1 Paradiso, xiii., 23. 
Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it, 

Remains immutable, and hence beneath 

The ideal signet more and less shines through. 
Conyito, iii., 6.—Hpist. ad Can. Grand.—Cf. Dionys. Areop., de Cal. 

Hierarch., iv. 

2 Paradiso, xix., 14.—Epist. ad Cun. Grand. 
8 Paradiso, xxxiii., 29.—Cf. de Causis, 9. 


204 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Among these innumerable works, there are few which God re- 
garded with more complacency than man, whose free and im- 
mortal soul presented features like unto Himself, and thus solicit- 
ed His predilection. Sin, by disfiguring this resemblance, de- 
graded man from the rank which he held in the affection of his 
Creator. There were only two ways of regaining that lost rank: 
either by a laborious reparation springing from Himself, or by a 
gratuitous rehabilitation granted to him by God. But it was not 
possible for man to descend so low by the humility of his obedi- 
ence, as he had presumed to rise high by the audacity of his revolt; 
he remained fatally incapable of offering satisfaction. It was then 
needful that God Himself should act in his favor, either by show- 
ing him mercy, or by showing him both merey and justice. He 
preferred the second way, whereby He might manifest the union 
of His infinite perfections: the work is the more dear to the 
workman as he the more clearly recognizes in it his own handi- 
craft. It was more bountiful in God to deliver Himself up, and, 
by undergoing the punishment, to give to humanity the power 
to lift itself, than it would have been to remit the penalty due, 
without any merit acquired. By the pure act of His boundless 
love, the Word unites to Himself our infirm, fallen, proscribed 
nature. This humiliation offered an adequate victim to inflexible 


justice. From the first day to the last night of the world, never 


In the Thirteenth Century. 205 


else was seen nor will be seen, the accomplishment of so profound 
and magnificent a design.' 

But redemption is completed only by the successive perfectinS 
of the generations which follow one another upon the earth, and 
by their coronation in glory. This is the object of that especial 
Providence which is ever incomprehensible, whether it predestines 
the elect, endows them with unequal gifts, makes evil serve in 
the triumph of good; or whether, although inexorable in its de- 
crees, it nevertheless allows itself to be touched by prayer and by 
the merit of virtue,? and attracts our intellects and our wills in 
ihe design of thus effecting the concentration of all our efforts. 
For the Alphais also the Omega: the God who has revealed Him- 
self as the Creator has promised to be the Remunerator: He is 


the Cause, He will also be the End.s 





1 Paradiso, Vii., 38-39. 
Nor ‘twixt the first day and the final night 
Such high and such magnificent proceeding 
By one or by the other was or shall be ; 
For God more bounteous was himself to give 
To make man able to uplift himself, 
Than if he only of himself had pardoned. 
Cf. St. Bonaventura, Compendium, iv., 6. 
2 Paradiso, xx., 45; xxi., 32; xxxii., 22.—Purgatorio, vi., 41.—Paradiso, 
ix., 36; xx., 33. 
7 Paradiso, i., 33 iv., 42; xxxiii., 16.—Cf. Boethius, lib. iii., pros. 10. 


200 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Here it would seem as if the poet must prove faithless to his 
systematic method of procedure, whereby each series of concep- 
tions is reflected in a corresponding vision: it would seem as 
though an image could here only hamper the thought. But 
genius accepted the challenge; and never, perhaps, either before 
or since, has poetic expression risen to more perfect purity com- 
bined with more daring energy. The heavens opened: a lumin- 
ous point appeared, which sent forth rays ofa brightness beyond 
all that the eye could sustain. Amid the stars that stud the skies, 
the one which here below appears to us the most minute would 
seem equal to the moon if compared with this indivisible point. 
At about the same distance at which a colored halo is formed 
around the orb whose rays it reflects, a circle of fire wheeled 
round this inmovable point so rapidly that its swiftness exceeded 
that of the rotating heavens. Other concentric circles, to the 
number of nine, surrounded this primal one, always more 
vast in their dimensions, but Jess swift in their course, less pure 
in their brilliancy. Then, as the poet stood in suspense between 
wonder and doubt, it was said to him: ‘On that point depend 
the heavens and the whole of nature.” That point was God. In 
tlhe circles which he perceived to be mutually attracted toward 
their common centre, he recognized the nine orders of spirituas 


creatures, who themselves drawn on by love, in turn draw after 


In the Thirteenth Century. 267 


them the entire universe: these were the angels. ' Then, when 
his sight, miraculously strengthened, was enabled to gaze into 
the point which had at first so dazzled it, he there saw gathered 
into a single beam, so to speak, and reduced to the state of sim- 
ple light, everything that is displayed throughout the universe, 
substance, mode, and accident: these were the typal ideas of 
creation. Within the same point, but at a still greater depth, 
three circles were to be seen, equal in circumference, but differ- 
ing in color; the Second was, as it were, the splendor of the First, 


and the Third like to a flame emanating from the two others. Thus 





1 Paradiso, xxviii., 6-14. 
. A point beheld I, that was raying out 
Light so acute, the sight which it enkindles 
Must close perforce before such great acuteness. 
And whatsoever star seems smallest here 
Would seem to be a moon if placed beside it 
As one star with another star is placed. 
Perhaps at such a distance as appears 
A halo cincturing the light that paints it, 
When densest is the vapor that sustains it, 
Thus distant round the point a circle of fire 
So swiftly whirled, etc....... 
aleisterenietarets “ From that point 
Dependent is the heaven and nature all.”’ 
—Cf. S. Dionys. Areop., de Celest. Hierarch.—St. Bonaventura, Com- 


pendium, ii., 15.—Aristot., Metaph.. xii. 


268 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


did the Trinity manifest Itself. The second circle, when closely 
considered, seemed (without losing its primitive color) to bear de- 
picted upon it a human form, a symbol of the incarnation of the 
Word.' Whilst he was endeavoring to understand this wondrous 


spectacle, the poet thrilled with the joy of comprehension; he 





1 Paradiso, xxxiii., 29. 

I saw that in its depth far down is lying 

Bound up with love together in one volume, 

What through the universe in leayes is scattered ; 
Substance, and accident, and their operations, 

All interfused together in such wise 

That what I speak of is one simple light. ... 
Within the deep and luminous subsistence 

Of the High Light appeared to me three circles, 

Of threefold color and of one dimension, 
And by the second seemed the first reflected 

As Iris is by Iris, and the third 

Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.... 
That circulation, which being thus conceived 

Appeared in thee as a reflected light, 

When somewhat contemplated by mine eyes, 
Within itself, of its own very color 

Seemed to me painted with our effigy, 

Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein. 

Cf. Plato, Timaeus, Epinomis,—St. Bonaventura, Compendium, Assueps 


—St. Thomas, prima, q. 15. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 269 


felt himself to have become such that it was impossible for him 
to turn his eyes from the point wherein was concentred all the 
bliss to which human wishes can aspire; and his will, sweetly 
attracted, entered into the harmonious movement of universal 
order. He became sensible of the work of sanctification within 
him. All mysteries were unveiled to him by immediate intuition. 
This was a thinking without effort, consequently without pro- 
cesses of reasoning or employment of memory; it was a state of 
intelligence which has no name among men; it was a complete 
participation in that philosophy, the only true one, which is that 
of saints and angels, which is in God Himself, the infinite love 


of the infinite wisdom.! 





1 Paradiso. xxxiii., 49.—Convito, iii., 13. 


PAR TAL, 


CHAPTER I. 
DANTE’S PHILOSOPHY CONSIDERED.—ANALOGIES WITH ORIENTAL 
DOCTRINES. 


aN 5 . . . . . 
ee AN cannot discern the order which reigns in creation with- 





out experiencing something of the delight naturally felt 
by a son who comes upon indications of his father’s 
presence. The most abstract ideas interest him in that they are 
related to other branches of knowledge leading to God; for m us, 
interest is mainly the consciousness of relations. Even the pro- 
ductions of the human mind have little or no value in our eyes 
unless, as they lie side by side in our memories, they have some 
bond of union among themselves. A system without analogies 
would be a system without value. But, far from such a condition 
of things being the actual fact, in regard to philosophical systems 
all the conceptions of philosophers are overtopped by a certain 
number of main problems, to which there can be but a certain num- 
ber of solutions oranswers; these answers, necessarily repeated, be- 
come rallying points, around which thinkers in all ages have ranged 
themselves as belonging to divers schools; they are indeed so 
many characteristic marks, serving to classify each doctrine, which 


marks must be recognized in order that the doctrine may be duly 
270 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 271 


defined. Besides, every doctrinal teaching inevitably takes ac- 
count of the labors of previous ages, such labors serving as prem- 
ises; consequences are drawn from these which will in turn be 
premises for times to come; and this it is that gives to such 
teaching its rank as effect and as cause, and confers upon it his- 
torical importance. Finally, while a doctrine thus places itself, un- 
der the head of filiation and of paternity, in some onc of the great 
families of ideas which we find recorded in history (now as rivals, 
now as allies, but always living), it shares in the portion of truth 
- which is in them and which gives them life: hence it is not diffi- 
cult to penetrate to the very essence of the doctrine that we may 
discover whatsoever of true it really embraces. Thus, when we 
have compared the philosophy of Dante with that prevailing in 
the illustrious schools of the East and of Greece, of the Middle 
Ages and of modern days, we shall have classified it by com- 
paring it with known types; we shall have established what it 
borrowed and what it transmitted, its origin and its tendency : 
we may then easily pronounce upon the justness of its maxims, as 
we find them belonging to systems that have been already 
judged. This appreciation, historical as to its form, will then be 
fundamentally a criticism; the point of right and the point of 
fact will be blended together. They will end by becoming one, 
indivisible to our eyes when we shall have reached the final ques- 


tion, that of orthodoxy; at that stage, the philosophy of Dante 


272 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


heing measured by an infallible rule, its legitimacy (so far as we 
are concerned) must depend upon its conformity with that rule. 

1. Two ways were open, one at the south and one at the north, 
either of which might have led Dante to the fountains of the 
time-lLonored Orient: these were the then frequent relations of 
Europe with the Saracens and the Mongols. We have already 
seen how, amid the struggle that occurred between Christianity 
and Islamism in Spain and in Palestine, the sciences, placed under 
hospitable protection, passed from one camp to the other, giving 
rise to an active correspondence, which, from Bagdad and Cordova, 
extended into all Catholic countries and especially into Italy. 
Translations of Avicenna, of Algazel, of Averroés, circulating 
through all hands, could not have failed to fall into those of Dan- 
te; repeated quotations found in his writings confirm this convic- 
tion.! An exact acquaintance with Mussulman doctrines may 
be perceived in the judgment that he pronounces upon them. 
While the greater number of his contemporaries held the disciples 
of the Koran to be pagans, and regarded Mahori as an idol, he 


regards Islamism as an Arian sect, and Mahomet as the leader of 





1 Convito, ii., 14.—Avicenna, de Intellig., iv.; Algazel, Logic. et Phil.,i.,4. 
Thid., iii., 4.—Avicenna, de Anima, iii., 3. 
lbid., iv., 13.—Averroés, in Aristot., de Anima, iii. 
Thid., iv., 21.—Avicenna, de Anima, Aphorism., 38; Algazel, ii., 5. 
Thid., iii., 2, 6, 7; iv., 21, ete. Epist. ad Can. Grand.—Lib. de Causis. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 273 


the greatest schism that ever desolated the Church, the said 
schism having been in its turn chastised by the divisions existing 
among its followers, under the mutually inimical standards of 
Omar and of Ali.1 Now, these same Sacicanss the latest heirs 
of Alexandrian syncretism, and also initiated into the mysteries 
of Persian Sufism, thus touched upon two sides the antique Indian 
wisdom, which seems to have sent forth productive offshoots into 
Persia and Egypt. It was also found with its fundamental dog- 
mas in the religion of Buddha, which, banished (after bloody strug- 
gles) from the Peninsula of Hindostan, invaded northern Asia, 
and brought under its influence the Mongolian hordes scattered 
between the Altai and the Caucasus. These people being set in 
motion, formidable irruptions (toward the middle of the thirteenth 
century) desolated the Sclavonic and Germanic countries. Later, 
the wise policy of the Holy See arrested their progress, and peace- 
ful relations were established between Christian princes and the 
grandsons of Ghengis-khan. Buddhist ambassadors appeared in 
the capital and at the general assembly of Catholicity, at Rome 
and at the second Council of Lyons: in return, Rome and France 


sent to their new allies missionaries charged with bearing to them 


1 Inferno, xxviii., 11; Jbid., xvii., 6. Allusion to the commerce of Europe 
with the Turks. 

Convito, ji., 9. The beliefs of the Saracens quoted as witnessing to the 
immortality of the soul. 


274 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


faith as well as peace. Industry also had its yenturous missions. 
The ways traced out by John de Plano Carpini and De Ruysbroeck 
were followed by Venetian merchants; numerous accounts of 
travels, written or verbal, were circulated; and in that age, more 
busied than is our own with the interests of the future life, the 
theological opinions of the Mongols would certainly not remain 
unknown to the curiosity of European men of learning. Dante 
especially, eager to know, always in search of traditions and doc- 
trines which might find a place in the cumulation of his vast po- 
etic composition —he who, besides, must more than once have 
met with Tartar envoys at the courts of princes, could not have 
failed to enquire into their beliefs. He refers to them, and cites 
them as witnesses to his own assertions.! A twofold means of 
communication thus placed him, unknown to himself, in connec- 
tion with the sacerdotal phiiosophers dwelling on the banks of 
the Ganges. If we call to mind the fact that their learning, so 
vaunted throughout antiquity, had several times been consulted 
by the wise men of Greece, and that it had left traces even in the 
writings of some of the Fathers of the Church, we may therein 
perceive a third method of communication. 

2. At the outset, some remarkable analogies are met with be- 


tween Indian opinions and those of the Florentine poet regarding 








1 Allusion to the industry of the Tartars, Inferno, xvii., 6.—Their belief 
in the immortality of the soul, Convito, ii., 9. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 275 


the external figure of the earth and the mysteries hidden in its 
innermost parts. The Brahmans represent Mt. Meru as the piv- 
otal point of the world: from its foot ray forth all the countries 
inhabited by men and by genii: on its summit is situated the ter- 
restrial dwelling-place of the gods. The mountain of Purgatory, 
as deseribed in the Divine Comedy, was the centre of the continent 
primarily destined to be the abode of mankind; it is crowned by 
the delightful shades of the terrestrial Paradise.1. The sombre 
empire of Yama, like the realm of Satan, is hollowed out in sub- 
terranean depths, composed of several circles, which descend, one 
below another, into interminable abysses. The number of these 
circles, as variously reported by mythologists. is often nine, or 
some multiple of nine. The punishments there met with are 
similar, and are portioned out to like crimes: darkness, fiery sands, 
seas of blood into which tyrants are plunged, burning regions suc- 
ceeded by areas of ice.* 

In addition to these points of superficial resemblance, still closer 
relations may be found. Such is the peculiar opinion of Dante, 


according to which, souls detached by death from the bodies in 





1 B. Bergmann, Hsquisses du systeme religieux des Mongol’, in his 
Voyage chez les Kalmouks.—Guigniaut, Symboliq., t. i—Dante, Purga- 
torio, passim. 

* B. Bergmann, Voyage chez les Kalmouks, and Lois de Manou, 1., 


iv., sl. 87; xii., sl. 40, 76.—Dante, Inferno, passim. 


276 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


which they dwelt are invested with aerial bodies. This hypothe- 
sis, borrowed from Paganism, and variously renewed in Christian 
philosophy, is nowhere found with more complete developments 
and more constant features of resemblance than in the systems of 
India. ‘If the soul,” we are there told, “has practised virtue 
and has rarely fallen into vice, clothed in a body borrowed from 
the five elements, it enjoys the delights of Paradise. But, if it 
has often given itself over to vice, and but rarely to virtue, it takes 
another body, in the formation of which the five subtile elements 
concur, and the said body is destined to the tortures of hell. 
When the souls have tasted of the joys or have undergone the 
pains due to them, the elementary particles separate, and re-enter 
the elements from which they had been taken.” ! 

At other times we find the Christian poet dealing with oriental 
ideas, but in the way of disagreement and controversy. Thus, 
one of the most serious errors of the Brahmanical theology, one 
which savors strongly of pantheism, is that which supposes in 
man the existence of two distinct souls; one, individual, constitut- 
ing the personality of each person, butrestricted to the knowledge 
of facts and of individual things; the other, a soul by means of 
which a knowledge of universal truths may be acquired, the im- 
mutable reason, the soul of the world, God Himself. Whence it 


1 Lois de Manou, xii., 16-21.- Dante, Purgatorio, xxv., 27. Convito, ii., 
9. 


In the Thirteenth Century. O77 


follows, that the aim of science being unceasingly to lead back 
the particular to the general, is also to blend the individual soul 
with the infinite soul, and to lose the personality of man in the 
divine immensity. This theory, reproduced by Averroés, made 
considerable noise amid scholastic controversies; it was one of 
the seeds of corruption which the anti-Christian school of Fred- 
eric II. had been active in gathering and sowing broadcast. It 
had attracted the especial solicitude of Catholic doctors ; Dante 
joined in their attacks upon it, and in maintaining the unity, the 


indivisibility, and consequently the dignity, of the human mind.! 





1 Lois de Manou, vVi., 65; xii., 14-18.—Let the wise man reflect, with 
the closest application of his mind, upon the subtile and indestructible 
essence of the Supreme Soul, and on its existence within the bodies of 
beings the loftiest and the lowliest. From the substance of the Supreme 
Soul escape, as sparks from fire, innumerable vital principles, which cease- 
lessly communicate motion to creatures ...etc. Colebrooke, Essai sur la 
philosophte des Hindous, Pauthier’s translation, p. 56. Upnek-hat, 
passim. The individual soul is named Djiv-alma; the universal soul, 
Paramalma (roots, Djiv, to live; Para, sovereign). The dangerous nature 
of the pantheistic doctrine, scattered abroad throughout Christendom with 
the writings of Averroés, aroused the zeal of the doctors; the activity of 
this discussion may be seen in the numerous treatises of the time contra 
Averrhoistas, especially in those of Albert the Great and St. Thomas 
Aquinas. Dante could not fail to take part in so widely spread a contro- 
versy : in the twenty-fifth canto of the Purgatorio, we find the Christian 
thesis against the Averroists in its turn presented. 


278 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


But the two schools of thought which we have just seen in 
collision again, under more favorable circumstances, approach one 
another, and the result is the more striking that in this case the 
intermediate steps do not appear. We have seen that Evil and 
Good, isolated or in conflict, formed the three great categories 
wherein were co-ordinated the conceptions of Dante; that in de- 
scribing Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, he intended to depict, under 
allegorical forms, the three qualities, the three modes of being of 
humanity, to wit: vice; passion, which is the struggle between 
virtue and vice ; and finally, virtue. Now, here is what has been 
taught from time immemorial in the Brahmanical schools 
of Ellora and Benares: ‘ The soul of man has three qualities ; 
goodness, passion, and darkness. The distinctive sign of good- 
ness is knowledge ; that of darkness is ignorance ; that of passion 
consists in desire and aversion. To the quality of goodness be- 
long the study of the sacred books, austere devotion, religious 
science, purity, the fulfilment of duty, and meditation on the Su- 
preme Soul. To act only in the hope of reward, to give oneself up 
to the guidance of the senses, to abandon oneself to discourage- 
ment, are the marks of the quality of passion. Cupidity, indolence, 
atheism, the omission of the prescribed acts, are the signs by 
which we recognize the quality of darkness.” This threefold 
division is not limited to the phenomena of the moral life; it ex- 


tends to the whole of creation, of which man is the image. ‘ The 


In the Thirteenth Century. 279 


three qualities accompany all beings.” It is by them that we dis- 
tinguish on earth genii, men, and the innumerable tribes of 
animals and plants. More than this, they pass beyond the limits 
of our temporary dwelling-place ; they embrace and share between 
them the three worlds: to goodness belongs the world of gods, to 
passion is given over that of men, and darkness reigns in the 
world of demons. The Indian sects have multiplied indefinitely ; 
in all of them the distinction of the three qualities has remained 


as a principle giving its form to the entire theological teaching.' 
o to) fo} oO 








1 Manou, xii., 12;and following, 26-39.—Dante, Epist. ad Can. Grand. 


And especially the preface to the commentary ascribed to his son, cited 


above, 


CHAPTER ILI. 


RELATIONS OF DANTE’S PHILOSOPHY TO THE SCHOOLS OF ANTIQ- 


UITY.— PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.—IDEALISM AND SENSISM. 


ND yet, Asia must have been for Dante what it still is for 
us, a region veiled in the shades of mystery. ‘It was on 
the horizon of Greece that he saw the light of philosophy 

rise for the first time in all its glory. He followed it through its 
principal phases, which he found described in several excellent 
ancient works, but especially in those of the first and most complete 
historian of the science, Aristotle.! Doubtless, the translation of 
the Ethics, by his master, Brunetto Latini, had early familiarized 
him with the stagyrite. Later, two complete versions and num- 
erous commentaries had enabled him not only to penetrate deeply 
into the immense edifice of the peripatetic teaching, but even 


closely to examine all its parts.” These manifold explorations 


' It is in fact according to the account given by Aristotle, that Dante is 
accustomed to report the opinions of the more ancient philosophers. He 
also borrows much from the historical narrations of Cicero. See the Convito, 
passim. 

* Convito, ii., 15. He cites two translations of Aristotle, the old oneand 
the new. St. Thomas makes tbe same distinction.—Convito, iv., 8, quota- 
tion from the prologue of St. Thomas on the Ethics, 

280 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 281 


did not remain without result; in the Convito alone, we find, in 
addition to simple allusions, seventy quotations from the Meta- 
physies, the Physics, the Treatise on the Soul, the Ethies, the 
Politics, from the various writings making up the Organum, and 
from other less famous essays. These reminiscences likewise 
serve Dante as authorities within whose shadow he can find shel- 
ter: he allows them as much empire over his convictions as they 
occupy space in his memory. Aristotle receives from him the 
most appreciative names: the Doetor of reason, the Sage from 
whom nature had withheld the fewest of her secrets, the Master 
of those who know. Temporal society, according to him, in order 
to prepare for itself long ages of prosperity, would only have to 
subject itself to the two powers, the philosophical and the politi- 
cal, Aristotle and the Emperor. After having exalted the suc- 
cessors of the Czsars to so lofty a position, he gives them as 
their colleague in the government of the world, the preceptor of 
Alexander; he seats him as the sole immortal on the throne which 
princes oceupy only temporarily. He goes farther, and, calling 
to mind the errors made by the philosophers of the first ages in 
pursuing their researches for the Sovereign Good, the Last End of 
human existence, he shows the truth as partly seen by Socrates 
and Plato, but as finally disengaged by the efforts of Aristotle 
from the obscurity still surrounding it. And since the ordering 


of the means pertains to him who knows the end, as mariners 


282 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


confidently depend on the skill of their pilot, so those who float 
on the stormy sea of life ought to give themselves up to the di- 
rection of the inspired guide sent them by Heaven. Thus all the 
destinies of science are embraced within the peripatetic teaching. 
Eminently worthy of credence and obedience, consecrated by 
universal adoption, it has acquired a religious character: we may 
even proclaim it catholic.! 

After this definite recognition of a sovereignty before which 
every intelligence was in duty bound to bow, it would seem as if 
the promised fidelity ought to have been maintained. We are 
hence, for the moment, astonished to hear grave witnesses place 
Dante as a faithless vassal in the opposing ranks, and represent 
him as one of the most illustrious disciples of Plato.2 However, 
we find Plato numbered among the precursors of Aristotelianism, 
and awarded a lofty pre-eminence over the founders of the other 
schools. Dante often mentions him as an excellent man; he 


avails himself of his example ; if he differs from him, it is always 





1 Convito, i., 9; iii.,5; iv., 2,17, 27.—Inferno, iv., 44.—Convito, iv., 6. See 
the whole chapter. Dante nevertheless recognizes the insufficiency of 
Aristotle on sundry points of theology and astronomy. Convito, ii., 3, 5; 
iv., 15, 22. 

2 Marsilius Ficinus, apud Clarorum Virorum Theodori Prodomi, ete. 
E\ypistolas ex Codd, MSS. collegii Romani, Rome, 1754.—Brucker, Hist. 
critic. philos., Period iii., part i., bk. i., chap. i—Memorie per la vita di 


Dante, ete. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 283 


after most respectful preliminaries; if he condemns him, he has- 
tens to point out a possible justification.’ We cannot doubt 
that he was acquainted with the Timzeus, on which two commen- 
taries existed in his day; one by Chalcidius used with favor in 
scholastic teaching; the other, by St. Thomas Aquinas, the loss 
of which is greatly to be deplored. But especially Cicero, Boethius 
and St. Augustine, with sundry other Christian teachers whose 
writings are still redolent of the perfume of the Academy, must 
have exerted upon him an irresistible influence, and have attracted 
him as a perhaps involuntary proselyte to Platonic ideas.? 

Hence it becomes proper to consider what elements the two 
great Greek schools can claim in the philosophy of Dante. 

2. Several general features suggested themselves in the begin- 
ning as likely to characterize the philosophical genius of the Ital- 
ian poet; the study of his work has rendered these easily recog- 
nizable. They are, a bold, and naturally, metaphysical turn of 


thought, placing itself from the outset in the invisible world, be- 





1 Convito, ii., 5, 14; iii., 9; iv., 15.—Paradiso, iv., 8-19.—Epist. ad Can. 
Grand.....** We indeed see with our intellect many things which words 
are wanting to express, which fact is abundantly insinuated by Plato in his 
books through the employment of metaphors. He knew many things by 
the light of intelligence which he was notable to express in direct speech.”” 

2 Boethius de Consolatione, lib. i., pros.3; lib. iii., pros. 9; lib. y., pros. 5. 


St. Augustine, The City of God, bk. viii. Confess., vii., 9, and passim. 


284 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


yond the limits of time and of this earth; a metaphorical form of 
expression (not the result of caprice, but of a system), which util- 
izes all the images of creation, for the reason that all reflections 
of the eternal truths that it purposes to show forth; and lastly, 
an all-pervading aspiration toward two things not found here be- 
low in their entirety, but still capable of being here partially real- 
ized—perfection and happiness. But this triple tendency toward 
the true, the good, and the beautiful—is not this exactly that 
which constitutes the chief honor of the genius of Plato? He 
too abandons the world of phenomena and appearances, the cay- 
ern wherein are limned pale shadows, that he may go where he 
can contemplate absolute realities in the noonday light of meta- 
physies.' Accustomed to consider visible things merely as repre- 
sentative of divine conceptions, he sees in nature only a magnifi- 
cent language spoken by the Most-High; he endeavors to employ 
the same speech, and his style glows withthe admirable color 
which makes it the envy of poets. Andyet he disdains to wander 
off into idle speculations, or to forget his aim, in listening to the flat- 


tering sound of his own discourse; his words call for positive re- 





1 Cousin, Course of History of Philosophy, vol. i., Lesson 7.—Plato, Re- . 
public, book vii.—When citing in the notes the Dialogues of Plato, we do not 
intend it to be supposed that Dante had seen the texts, and thence had a 
direct knowledge of the passages referred to; we are only concerned in 


establishing analogies, not in showing reminiscences. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 285 


sults, and salutary reforms ; for him, all science is resolved into the 
science of the Good. This science is the express object of all his 
lessons; and his disciples, surprised to hear him discourse under 
this head of geometry and astronomy, of gymnastics and music, 
will finally comprehend him when from these various ideas he 
disengages the laws that are to preside over the improvement and 
the happiness of mankind.! Faculties so similarly balanced in the 
two minds, give reason to anticipate a remarkable similarity in 
their products. 

Among all the conjectures by which the Greek philosophers en- 
deavored to raise themselves to a knowledge of the Divinity, none 
had agreed more nearly than those of Plato (incomplete as they 
were) with the revelations of Christianity: they had obtained the 
approbation of its gravest apologists; Dante was not called upon 
to be more severe. The God adored by the disciple of Socrates is 
demonstrated not only by the mechanical forces of, but by the gen- 
eral order reigning in, nature. He is then conceived not only as 
powerful, but also as intelligent and good; ® he is incorporeal, he 
is the first equation, the absolute beauty, the absolute unity, the 


being that knows neither change nor repentance.* Sovereign of 








1 Plato, Republic, vi. See also the fragment of Aristoxenes cited by M. 
Ravaisson: Essei sur la mataphysique @’Aristote, page 71. 

2 Plato, The Laws, x.; Republic. vi. 

3 Plato, Phedo, Cf. Dante, Paradiso, xv., 25. 


286 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the universe, he is not confounded with the universe; ! he re- 
mains independent and alone, himself sufficing to his own beati- 
tude. By the glimmer of certain expressions, which perhaps be- 
tray the secret of an esoteric teaching, it would seem as if one 
might perceive in this idea of the divine unity, a vestige of the 
dogma of the Trinity, whether perhaps the founder of the Acad- 
emy had in some of his wanderings been initiated into the mys- 
teries of the Hebrews, or whether, more probably, he had gath- 
ered together some scattered remains of the primitive traditions. 
However this may be, we cannot deny the importance of his 
theory regarding the Word, the eternal generation and the future 
incarnation of Whom were doubtless unknown to him, but Whom 
he recognized as the Orderer of nature as well as the Iluminater 
of reason. Here is indeed the central point of the famous Pla- 
tonic doctrine of ideas; and here is also where Dante seems at 
first sight to be an imitator of Plato. 

In the beginning of things, as such beginning is portrayed by 
Greek philosophy, appeared the infinite Goodness. inaccessible to 
avarice or to jealousy, and desirous of surrounding Itself with 
works as far as might be good and perfect as Itself. These 
works could not be carried into effect without some pre-existing 


model, some pattern previously formed, some word which the 








1 Idem, Politics. 2 Timzeus, passim, 


8 Timzeus. Dante, Paradiso, xxix., 5. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 287 


artist utters within himself to guide him in his work, which word 
is nothing other than his reason applied to some determinate 
object.!. This may hence be called, a universal idea.? Such an 
idea, in so far as it corresponds to the different classes of beings 
embraced within the universe, is divided into so many distinct 
ideas. Ideas are endowed with a supreme reality, whether they 
remain as simple attributes of the divine understanding, or wheth- 
er they become detached from it as living emanations. Im- 
material and immutable, they lend their essence to all that hap- 
pens and that comes within our ken; it is by a constant participa- 
tion in the idea which is the type of their kind, that individuals 
exist.2 But along with this element of life and of perfection, 
there is in individuals a necessary element of corruption: the 
work never realizes the primal design in all its integrity. We 
must look for the cause of this in some blind and fatal force, in 
that receptacle of existences, called by us matter, which Plato 
presumes to be uncreated, and consequently invincible in its re- 


sistance.t Now, if we replace the role of Désposer by that of 





1 Timeus,—et plurib, aliis loc.—Cf. Paradiso, x., 1; xiii., 19. 

2 Plutarch, de Placitis philosophorum. 

3 Timeeus; Republic, x.; Parmenides.—Cf. Paradiso, viii., 35. Convito, 
iii., 6. 

4 Theactet.—Cf. Chaleidii, Comment. ad hune locum, p. 399. See also 
the learned commentary of M. Martin on the Timzeus ; Dante, Cf. Para- 
diso, xiii., 23; Convito, iii., 6. De Monarchia, Il. 


288 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Creator, do we not here find Dante’s conceptions in regard to the 
beginning of things: the motives determining the action of the 
Almighty; the Idea engendered by the Supreme Ruler being re- 
flected through every gradation of the universe, and sustaining by 
an interior energy the lowest creatures; also the source of im- 
perfection placed in matter, a stubborn wax that refuses to 
correspond entirely to the imprint placed upon it, or rather, an 
insufficient reservoir for the holding of all that infinite fecundity 
could bring forth? This last feature is above all remarkable in 
that the conclusion is accepted without the premises, and mat- 
ter is presumed to be cause of evil, although despoiled of its 
supposed eternity. 

In passing from the physical to the moral order, ideas are 
presented under another aspect: they preside over the origin of 
knowledge. The Supreme Reason, from which all beings proceed, 
also reveals itself to all intelligences: first to the superior spirit- 
ual existences, afterwards to man; it is like a sunbeam touching 
the heights of the soul, which it illumines, and whence it brings 
to light general notions, made in the image of the eternal ideas 
whose name they borrow. These notions taken together, 
constitute individual reason; they furnish the scientific, unvary- 
ing element of human knowledge; the other element, uncertain 


and fleeting, rests upon the testimony of the senses.! Such be- 


_— 


' Alcibiades, Timaeus; Republic, v., x., elc.—Cf. Purgatorio, xviii., 21; 
Paradiso, ii., 15 ; Convito, iii., 2; iv., 21. 


. In the Thirteenth Century. 289 


ing the teachings of the Academy, could they finda more faithful 
reproduction than in that poetical philosophy which regards all 
light as flowing from the bosom of the Divinity, illumining the 
contemplations of the blessed spirits, and even diffusing a faint 
twilight around the woeful dwellers in hell? The living are not 
deprived of it: they also find in the depths of their souls a power 
derived from on high, which reigns as a sovereign, and which 
does not permit the non-recognition of truth. 

The one-half of our destiny is to know, the other half is ¢o act. 
The principle of activity is love: love fills with its presence the 
entire universe, it sets the springs in motion, and makes them 
work together in an admirable harmony.! But it is especially in 
man that its influence is shown. It arouses him by attraction, 
sets him in motion by the sight of the desirable object, and allows 
him no rest until union be attained. This union could not be 
sterile: it engenders not only perishable creatures, but sometimes 
unhoped-for discoveries, masterpieces of art, generous deeds.* 
Thus, multiform and flexible, love cannot be called good or evil in 
itself; it obtains its merit from the end toward which it directs 


us. An inborn inclination draws us on towards gross pleasures; 





1 Banquet: Discourse of Eryximachus.—Farther on, Socrates boasts of 
knowing nothing but love. 
2 Banquet: Discourse of Aristophanes; Discourse of Agatho.—Cf. Con- 


vito, iii., 3; iv., 1; Purgatorio, xviii., 7; xxiv., 19. 


290 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


a happier impulse, favored by study and education, leads us to vir- 
tue. This latter love is the only one known to the soul of the true 
philosopher: the sight of beauty awakens in it uo impure de- 
sires: ' the beautiful is for it only the splendor of the true, the 
shadow of an invisible ideal toward which it continually tends; 
admiration restores to the soul the wings lost in its terrestrial 
captivity.2 When tracing these lines, the pen hesitates; it knows 
not whether the memories that guide it are those of the Phedrus 
and the Banquet, or indeed those of the Divine Comedy and the 
Convito. 

Analogies will be found to multiply as consequences accumu- 
late. The sublime instinet which leads to virtue divides as it 
approaches its term; virtue, which is one in its essence, assumes 
four principal forms: prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice 
—a classification that has become renowned.* But virtue implies 
fleeing from evil; and the strength to flee, the first that we re- 


quire in the battle of life, comes only from heayen.? It likewise 








1 Banquet: Discourse of Socrates.—Cf. Purgatorio, xviii., 13. The 
mystical tenderness of Dante for Beatrice is the first modern example of 
the love sung by Petrarch, of that species of affection which has deserved- 
ly received the name of Platonic love. 

2 Pheedrus.—Cf. Paradiso, passim. 

3 The Laws, 1.—Cf. Paradiso, passim, Purgatorio, xxix., 44. De Mon- 
archia, I. 


4 Alcibiades, 1.—Cf. Paradiso, x., 29; xxviii., 37. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 291 


implies an effort to accomplish the good, and it is also in heaven 
that this effort attains its end. Every man feels within himself 
a vague desire of which the object, still indeterminate, is that 
which he calls by the name of good. Now, among the things 
which appear to satisfy his desires, some yield him only a_ short 
and incomplete satisfaction; there are others which are alone 
capable of promising him lasting happiness. 

We must then distinguish between hwman or secondary goods, 
which are the qualities of the body and the favors of fortune, and 
the sovereign good, which is perfection so far as it may be attained 
through knowledge and virtue, such as it exists, supreme and in- 
comparable, in God Himself. ! 

It is then God from whom descend, and to whom ascend, all 
inferior goods; it is He who draws to Himself all the desires, or 
rather, all the memories of the soul. Fora time was when it 
contemplated Him face to face ; it enjoyed Him before it dwelt on 
the earth: it can draw near to Him only by lifting itself up, by 
becoming free and pure, like to Him, and pleasing in His sight 
through this resemblance.? But so grand a destiny could not be 
completed within the narrow limits of the present life. It is 


hence necessary that the radiant perspective of immortality should 





1 Banquet: Discourse of Socrates; Republic, vi. Phileb.; Republic, vi. 
—Cf. Purgatorio, xvi., 31; xvii., 33; xviii., 7; Paradiso, xvi., 6; Convito, 
iii., 2; iv., 12. 

2 Thewtet. Pheedrus, passim; Minos ; Banquet, Discourse of Socrates. 
—Cf. Purgatorio, xvi., 29; Paradiso, vii., 24. 


292 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


open out beyond the grave, that it may be to usa refuge from 
the many disappointments we have endured, the term of our in- 
satiable desires, the recompense of such merits as have received 
no remuneration here below.! At these transcendent heights, 
whither our gaze can no longer follow them, the swan of the 
gardens of the Academy and the eagle of Florence still hover 
together, and are lost to view in a like glorious radiance. . 

God recognized a priori, in order to explain the world; ideas, 
that we may comprehend realities; reason, to preside over ex- 
perience; the future life, to regulate this present life ; intelligible 
truths preceding in the logical order experimental truths ; are not 
these the leading features of idealism ? 

3. Let us not forget, however, that Dante, while accepting so 
large a number of Platonic dogmas regarding God, nature, and 
humanity, never dreamed of betraying the faith due to his first 
master, Aristotle. Let the muse be as free as she may in her 
gait, it is impossible not to perceive that she drags after her the 
remnant of a chain, doubtless gilded, but allowing the iron to be 
divined beneath the gold—token of a servitude but recently ended. 
We refer to the technical terms surprised at finding themselves 
ranged in harmonious strophes, the symmetrical classifications 
wherein thought finds its place with perfect exactitude, but 


whereinto enthusiasm does not enter,—in short, to the terminol- 








1 Epinomis.—Cf. Convito, iv., 22. We might point out still other analo- 
gies in the details: the famous comparison of Reason and the Senses to the 
rider and the horses (Phzedrus ;—Convito, iv., 26).—The sun considered as 
an image of God (Republic, vi.; Paradiso, passim). 


In the Thirteenth Century. 293 


ogy and the method from which Dante, in spite of his efforts, 
never entirely frees himself. We here readily recognize the 
powerful influence of the Stagyrite, who first created the language 
of science, and who gave to it both a lexicon and a syntax when 
he gave to it definition and division as its constituent principles. 

Nothing is more intimately connected with language than are 
abstract ideas, which in the absence of language would disappear, 
which indeed, at first sight, seem, out of it, to possess no reality. 
The ontology is not solely in the words, but neither is it without 
the words; Dante had recourse to the expressions of Aristotle 
only to preserve the tradition of his ontological ideas; he held 
the clue, that he might penetrate at will into the labyrinth. 
Hence his profound reflections upon essence and cause, the oft- 
repeated distinction between substance and accident, between the 
necessary and the contingent, power and act, matter and form. 
These abstractions are not valueless: the genus is really in the 
species, the species in the individual; they form, as it were, the 
subtile woof on which are traced all living realities. Thus has 
the master spoken, and thus does the disciple understand the 
matter.! 

Hence we cannot be surprised if both reduce the whole of 


physics to the play of three principles: matter, form, and priva- 
—————————————————__—————————————————— 

1 See Rayaisson, Essai sur la Metaphysique d’ Aristote, vol. i., p. 154. 
—Cf. Paradiso, xxix., 18, 12; xxxiii., 29. 


204 Dante, and Cathohe Philosophy 


tion. From the opposition of the last two, results motion; and 
motion, in its variety and its multiplicity, produces and explains 
the phenomena of the visible world. From elementary molecules 
up to animated organisms, everything moves, either by impulsion 
or spontaneously : the revolutions of the stars and the generation 
of animals are the two most notable examples. However, as- 
tronomy and physiology were represented in antiquity by two 
men, Ptolemy and Galen, whose views, broader and more exact, 
best satisfied the curiosity of Dante.! His confidence in the 
Stagyrite, shaken on these two points, remained intact on strictly 
philosophical questions—those that touched upon the constitution, 
the faculties, and the destiny of man. 

Man, as defined by the Peripatetic doctrine, is a composite 
being, having for matter, a body, and for form, a soul. But, as 
the form can exist only as it is impressed upon matter, the soul, 
although different from the body, could not be preserved without 
it.2 These deductions, which in fact threaten the dogma of im- 
mortality, are corrected by the perspicacity of the Italian philos- 
opher: the soul still appears to him as the constitutive act, the 


essential mode of being of human nature; but he conceives it as 





1 Physics, i., 1; iii, 1; iv., 11.—De Calo, i., ii, iv.—De Generat. 
Animal., ii., 3.—Cf. Purgatorio, xxv., 13; Inferno, xi., 34; Convito, fii. 
11; iv., 2,93 4i., 3, 4 5 iif., 95 ii., 145 iv., 21. 


2 De Anima, ti., 1, 2.—Cf. Inferno, xxvii., 25. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 295 


separable from the body, and makes it survive in a state of sepa- 
ration. Then, analyzing, as Aristotle had done before him, the 
powers that are in it, he finds three principal ones, the vegeta- 
tive, the sensitive, and the rational; he explains their unity and 
Superposition ; and to make his meaning clearer, he borrows 
from geometry the same similitudes.' When he describes the 
operations of the senses, especially those relating to vision, he 
follows in the track of Aristotle, making the figure of the object 
reach the eye through a diaphanous medium, and pass from the 
eye to the brain by means of a communicated impression.? But 
nowhere does he show himself a more scrupulous follower than 
in the exploration of the higher regions of thought, when char- 
acterizing apprehension, imagination, and memory; * when he 
distinguishes between the active and the passive intellect; 4 
when he takes note of the immutable principles not derived from 
experience, but self-evident.’ Thus, all knowledge supposes two 
conditions accomplished: facts perceived without, a general truth 
revealed within. So that, sensibility being the seat of sensible 
things, and the intellect the seat of intelligible things, the soul, in 


which these two are united, is an abridgment of the universe.® 








1 De Anima, ii., 3; iii., 12.—Cf. Convito, iv., 7. 

2 De Anima, ii., 7.—Cf. Convito, iii., 9. 

3 De Anima, iii., 3, 4.—Cf. Purgatorio, iy., 3; xvii., 9; xviii., 8. Para- 
diso, i., 3, ete. 

4 De Anima, iii., 6.--Cf. Purgatorio, xxv., 22; Convito, iv., 21. 

5 Analytic. poster., i., 31. Topic., i., 1.—De Anima, ii., 8.~Cf. Pur- 
gatorio, xviii., 19. Paradiso, ii., 15; iv., 21. 

§ De Anima, iii., 9. Ibid., iii., 5.—Cf. Convito, passim. 


290 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


While the founder of the Lyceum had devoted his most labor- 
ious meditations to the development of logic, and while that 
formed his chief merit according to the common opinion of pos- 
terity, ethics had likewise claimed a considerable share in his in- 
vestigations; his researches in this direction gave him his fore- 
most title to the admiration of Dante. The poet therein found 
the phenomenon of love treated in all its details, with a nicety 
neglecting nothing, but considered especially under the aspect 
known as friendship: the circumstances amid which this feeling 
takes its rise, the proportions which it requires between those 
whom it unites, the inevitable egotism hidden in its very root, the 
beneficent effects which it is capable of producing: nothing was 
omitted.! The other elements of human morality also had their 
place in that fine analysis: pleasure and the relation of mutual 
excitation which binds pleasure to action, likewise the liberty 
which remains constant between these two, often separating them, 
resisting enjoyment, even going half-way to meet suffering; vice, 
and its division into three categories: intemperance, malice, and 
bestiality ; ? the intellectual and the moral virtues, forming, as it 


were, two families ; * also, two methods of life between which 





1 Ethics, viii., passim, ix., 4.—Cf. Convito, iii., 2. 

2 Ethics, iii., 5; x.,5.—Cf. Purgatorio, x., xil., 7.—Paradiso, y., 7.—Ethics 
vii., 1.—Cf. Inferno, xi., 27. 

3 Ethics, iii., 1.—Cf. Convito, iv., 17. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 297 


men may choose, that of contemplation and that of practical ac- 
tivity, the first the nobler, and the latter the easier.!. With these 
data, it was allowable to undertake the solution of the problem of 
happiness. The good gifts of health, of strength, of riches, en- 
tered into it, as essential but insufficient conditions ; the true good 
under which all lesser goods must be co-ordinated, was the actiy- 
ity of the soul exercised within the limits of virtue. And this 
virtuous activity, when applied to the peaceful functions of con- 
templative life, gives the fullest measure of happiness to which 
humanity can attain.’ 

Finally, having reached the summit of the hierarchy of beings, 
Aristotle sums up the main results obtained by him in his labor- 
ious investigation: the idea of cause, which belongs to the order 
of abstractions; motion, which is found everywhere present 
throughout the universe; reflection and happiness, which are the 
privilege of mankind. From these results combined, he evolves 
the notion of God. The mechanical forces of bodies suppose a 
Mover who sets them in motion, who is Himself immovable, and 
consequently immaterial.* Heis then pure form, infinite act. 
But this act can be no other than the act of contemplation, which 


is also supremely happy. God may then be defined: A thought 


1 Ethics, x., 7.—Cf. Purgatorio, xxvii., 33 ; Convito, iv., 22. 
2 Ethics, i., 8.—Cf. Convito, iv., 17, 22.-De Monarchia, iti. 
3 Metaph., xiv., 8.—Cf. Paradiso, i., 25; xxiv., 44. 


298 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


which thinks Itself eternally, around which gravitate heaven and 
nature.! The gaps and errors in such a theory may readily be 
perceived: it supposes the eternity, not only of matter, but of the 
universe; it leaves to the Primal Mover neither providence, nor 
liberty, nor personality ; ? it can then be admitted only with many 
restrictions, and the poet-philosopher has by no means forgotten 
this; but he is indebted to it for profound views and exact for- 
mulz. 

Now, the points we have just mentioned, taken together, con- 
stitute what has been ealled, perhaps incorrectly, the sensism of 
the Peripatetics, which makes of experience acquired through the 
senses, the necessary, but not the sole, basis of all knowledge. 

4. We have now to examine how the rival teachings of the 
Academy and of the Lyceum became reconciled together in the 
thought of Dante, and by what new prodigy age-long controver- 
sies were suspended at the sound of the lyre. 

...Tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora. 

In the history of the human mind, Plato represents idealism, 
and consequently, synthesis; he addresses himself especially to 
souls endowed with that wonderful power of intuition known also 


as enthusiasm. As these chosen souls are rare, and follow one 





1 Metaph., xii.—Cf. Convito, iii., 2.—Paradiso, xxviii., 14. 


2 Brucker, Hist, critic., in Aristot,—Cicero, de Nat. Deor,, i., 13. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 299 


another at very irregular intervals of time, the traditions of 
Platonism were easily interrupted; besides, not being connected 
together by the bond of a strict method, they were exposed to 
dispersion, and readily lent themselves to be absorbed in other 
doctrines. Aristotle, on the contrary, represents sensism, and 
consequently, analysis. His work is within the reach of any 
laborious mind; and, as such are born every day, it could easily 
be preserved by their care, and transmitted as an inheritance com- 
ing down through known hands: also, the opinions composing it, 
being rigidly reduced toa systematic form, would naturally remain 
inseparable, and retain their common independence. His poetic 
genius would then have led Dante to the feet of Plato: but he 
had no ready access to the thoughts of that great man, except 
through a small number of writings, poorly interpreted. Again, 
he found all Plato’s best conceptions, modified and purified, in 
Christian theology; he accepted them with pious respect, without 
being able to trace them back to their origin and to name their 
author. On the contrary, as soon as he crossed the threshold 
of the School, he there found the authority of the Stagyrite im- 
movably seated; doubtless, he received his lessons through in- 
terpreters, but they gave themselves out as such, and aspired to 
no higher merit than that of fidelity: he naturally bowed down 
at the sight of such honors bestowed, and yielded to an influence 


which nothing resisted. There was room within his mind for all 


300 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


just admirations, for the reason that such admirations are never 
incompatible. It is true that the disciple of Socrates and the 
preceptor of Alexander have filled history with the noise of their 
controversies; and no one can deny that the current of their dom- 
inant prepossessions led them to serious disagreements. But also. 
while nothing apparently can be more opposite than the analysis 
and synthesis personified in them, nothing better accords with 
the general harmony of science. They place themselves at two 
opposite points of vyiew—so to speak, at the two poles of the intel- 
leciual world; but they are united by a common axis, and they 
command the same horizon. Their dogmas, reduced to more 
moderate expressions, complete and sustain one another. We 
may even say that the ideas, which are the keystone of the arch 
of the Academic edifice, touch closely upon the Peripatetic forms. 
The idea, in the dialogues which so magnificently set it forth, 
often takes the name of Zidos; it becomes forma, when translated 
into Latin.! If the idea is at once the type and the cause, the 
form is also both the element by which things are known, and 
that by which they subsist. It is not proven that Plato assigned 
to ideas an existence distinct from that of the objects which par- 
ticipate in them, and from the divine understanding in which 


they dwell.2 Aristotle recognizes the presence of his forms in the 





1 Cicero, Translation of the Timezeus. 
2 Cousin, Course of History of Philosophy, vol. i. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 301 


objects which they modify and in the mind which makes abstrac- 
tion of them.! Dante seems to have comprehended these analo- 
gies when, by alternate borrowings, he endeavors to reconcile the 
two Greek philosophers.? His conciliatory intention is still more 
plainly visible when he makes them both appear in the Elysian 
Fields placed at the entrance to his Inferno, where he shows 
them, the one surrounded by respectful homage as the Master of 
those who know, the other, seated at his side, sharing with him 
the sovereignty of the intellect.* 

Dante had then found, perhaps under favor of greater distance, 
the propitious position so anxiously sought by the Alexandrian 
eclectics, whence one might see the divergent lines of idealism 
and sensism intersecting one another, so to speak. And yet his 
relations with the philosophy of the ancients seem to have been 
restricted within the limits we have just laid down. If he in- 
veighs against Epicureanism, it is more especially against that 
phase of it prevalent in his own day; and he was only imperfectly 
acquainted, through the writings of Seneca, with the morality of 


the Stoies, which he exalted without stint in the person of Cato.‘ 





1 Idem, ibid.—Aristotle, de Anima, iii., 5. 
2 See especially, Convito, iv., 6. 
3 Inferno, iv., 44. 


4 Convito, iv., 28; Purgatorio, i. 


CHAPTER III. 


RELATIONS OF DANTE’S PHILOSOPHY WITH THE SCHOOLS OF THE 
MIDDLE AGES.—ST. BONAVENTURA AND ST. THOMAS 
AQUINAS.—MYSTICISM AND DOGMATISM. ! 


HE age that gave birth to the Divine Comedy had no share 
~~ 


in the general restoration of paganism which was ere long 


to take place in letters and in the arts. The study of the master- 
pieces of antiquity was ardently prosecuted; but there was 
not yet affected for them that exclusive veneration which is the 
less difficult for human pride that it is directed toward distant ob- 
jects, and amply compensated for by contempt for one’s contem- 
poraries and immediate predecessors. The most learned professors 
of Paris and Bologna, the most renowned artists of Pisa and 
Florence, understood how to profit by classic models without de- 
serting the sources of Christian inspiration: the lamp of their vig- 
ils often shone upon the pages of Holy Writ and the writings of 


the Fathers. Often, their piety led them to the foot of the altar 





| Tt must be remembered that St. Bonaventura and St Thomas were not 
the heads of two mutually exclusive and rival schools, but only the propa- 


gators of two philosophical methods, distinct, and yet easily reconcilable. 
302 


Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 303 


or to monastic solitudein search of more serene meditations; 
and again, from time to time, these uprightand single-hearted men 
took pleasure in frequenting popular assemblages, where legends 
and traditional canticles revealed to them truths and beauties they 
would not have found elsewhere. 

The daily intercourse maintained by Dante with the writers of 
Greece and Rome had not detached him from a still more intimate 
communion with the Doctors of Christianity. He beheld them, 
linked hand in hand down the ages, from the time of the cata- 
combs to his own day, forming a long and twofold chain: onthe 
one side, the Greek and Oriental school, whose learned contem- 
plations had became known to him through St. Dionysius the Are- 
opagite; and on the other, the Latin school of the West, which 
he had followed through all its phases; St. Augustine, Boethius,- 
and St. Gregory the Great, who are to be classed as still belong- 
ing to Roman literature; St. Martin of Braga, Isidore of Seville, 
Bede, and Rabanus Maurus, men of the barbarian period; St. 
Anselm, St. Bernard, Peter Lombard, Hugh and Richard of St. 
Victor, who inaugurated the labors of the Middle Ages.'! He 
names all these with praise, and repeatedly cites them either ex- 
pressly or by allusion. Among those in shose midst his life was 


passed, he appears to distinguish several who have survived the 





1 Paradiso, x., xii., passim. Epist. ad Can. Grand.—Convyito, passim. 


304 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


great shipwreck of time: A‘gidius Colonna, Peter the Spaniard, 
and the Sigier whose bold teachings set the rue du Fouarre in 
commotion.! But it is remarkable that he keeps absolute silence 
in regard to Raymond Lully, Duns Scotus, and Ockham, who at 
the beginning of the fourteenth century opened a new scholastic 
era. Hence, it is the thirteenth century, with its calm and majes- 
tic grandeur, with the close alliance then maintained between the 
four powers of thought—erudition, experience, reasoning, and in- 
tuition—which we are to find reproduced in the philosophy of 
Dante. We can form some idea of the extent of his reading and 
studies if we consider the innumerable reminiscences found in 
his writings; he thus followed the example of Albert the Great, 
whose vast repertories we often find him consulting. Although he 
seems not to have known of the labors of Roger Bacon, the as- 
tronomical or meteorological descriptions and comparisons frequent- 
ly adduced as if of special interest to him, the observations set 
forth, and the thesis maintained “ on the two Elements, Fire and 
Water,” show him to have been initiated into the experimental 
sciences. But erudite researches and the exploration of nature 
were not enough to satisfy the indefatigable energy of his mind: 
he found a broader and freer field in the speculations to which St. 


Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventura had opened the way. These 





1 Paradiso, x., xii. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 305 


two illustrious men shared between them the sympathies of the 
philosopher-poet. They had lived long enough to allow of his 
being a witness to the grief accompanying their death. In the 
learned world, he encountered their memory quite recent and all- 
powerful, their teachings and their virtues still confounded in one 
and the same living remembrance, and, as a consequence, the re- 
spect which they inspired still filled with love. Thus did he some- 
times treat with them as with nobie but kindly friends, quoting in 
support of his opinions, with a sublime familiarity, the good brother 
Thomas. And yet he anticipated, in his philosophical judgment 
he even went beyond, the solemn apotheosis which religious au- 
thority was one day to award to that same Brother Thomas; he 
placed the two Angels of the School in one of the most beautiful 
spheres of Paradise; he represented them as in a condition of 
fraternal sovereignty, towering above the blessed company of the 
Doctors of the Church. 

Thus the doctrines of Dante could not fail to exhibit traces 
of the ascendency exercised over him by the two principal mas- 
ters of his time, themselves the representatives of all that was 
wisest and purest in the scholastic teachings anterior to their 
day. 


2. In the first place, the greater part of the latent inclinations 


1 Conyito, iv., 30: 11 buon fra Tommaso. 


306 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


attracting Dante to the doctrines of Plato, would lead him to bow 
before St. Bonaventura and the still older mystics, such as the 
monks of St. Victor, St. Bernard, and St. Dionysius the Areopagite. 
There existed a peculiar affinity between the seraphic Franciscan 
and the head of the Academy. Of all the ancient philosophers, 
St. Bonaventura quoted none with greater predilection. He de- 
fended him, with a sort of filial piety, against his adversaries.! 
But especially did mysticism connect itself by numberless bonds 
with idealism: mysticism, philosophically considered, was nothing 
but idealism under a more exalted and luminous form. Both re- 
‘garded union with the Divinity as the source of light to men, and 
the end of human action. The one set down the place of this 
sublime union as in the reason, which it showed to be a region 
superior to that of the senses; the other looked upon it as accom- 
plished in spontaneous inspiration, which it placed above reason. 
The one propounded the theory of ideas as a hypothesis in which 
it believed, sustaining it with all the ardor of deeply-seated con- 
viction; the other issued from a state of ecstasy, burning with 
love, impatient to propagate itself externally with all the author- 


ity of virtue.2 In both, but especially in the last named, a great 








1 St. Bonaventura; In Magist. sentent., lib. ii., d.1; p.1; a. 13; q. 1.— 
Serm. 1 and 7, in Hexcemer.: “* Aristoteles incidit in multos errores.... 
exsecratus est ideas Platonis et perperam.”' 

2 See, on the characteristics of mysticism, Cousin, History of Philosophy, 
vol. i., bk. 4. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 307 


power was given to the heart over the mind, and the imagination 
held the keys of the heart: hence, a real need, a constant hat!) 
of allegorical expressions and legendary allusions. Contemplative. 
ascetic, symbolic,—such has mysticism always been, and such is 
the triple seal wherewith it stamped the philosophy of Dante. 
Contemplation proposes to itself God as its object. The mys- 
ties could find no surer way of confounding individual reason, and 
of obliging it to avow its insufficiency, than that of placing it im- 
mediately in the presence of the divine nature and of the two at- 
tributes thereof which seem at once the most incontestable and 
the most incompatible, immensity and simplicity. On the one 
hand, God reveals Himself as necessarily indivisible, and con- 
sequently incapable of having ascribed to Him the abstractions of 
quantity and quality by which we know creatures; indefinable, 
because every definition is an analysis which decomposes the 
subject defined; incomparable, because there are no terms where- 
with to institute any comparison: so that one might say, giving 
to the words an oblique meaning, that He is the infinitely little, 


that He is nothing.! But, on the other hand, that which is with- 





1 Dionys. Areop., de Divin. Nomin., 9. Id., Ibid. passim.—St. Bonaven- 
tura, Compendium, i.,17.—Cf£. Paradiso, xiv., 10; xxix., 4.—It must be re- 
membered that the expressions used by Dionysius the Areopagite and by 
his imitators, always feeble efforts of human speech to make divine things 
understood, cannot be taken ina literal sense, and must always be ex- 
plained by the general method of thought of the writers employing them. 


308 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


out extension, moves without resistance; that which is not to be 
grasped cannot be contained ; that which can be enclosed within 
no limitation, either actual or logical, isby that very fact limitless. 
The infinitely little is then also the infinitely great, and we may 
say, in a certain way, that itisall. In fact, if in immaterial beings 
the essence and the power cannot be separated, the first cause by 
its power being everywhere, everywhere also must be its essence 
This is the foree which sustains inanimate things, which is the 
life oi all that lives, the wisdom of all that is intelligent. The 
divine unity then multiplies itself as by a series of emanations, 


but it remains superior, isolated, distinet, and without communi- 


cating its incemmunicable perfections.' Below are ranged in 
divers ranks all creatures, united by a continuous influence. The 
three hierarchies of the angels, through the intermediation of the 
triple hierarchy of the Church, pour forth upon humanity strength, 
life, and wisdom; divided into nine choirs, they act through the 


revolutions of the nine celestial spheres down even upon the hum- 





1 Dionys. Areop., de Divin. Nomin., 11.—Id., de Celest. Hierarcn., iv. 
—St. Thomas also made use of the word Emanatio, and the fact has been 
misinterpreted, but he formally excludes any opinion favoring pantheism. 
St. Bonaventura, Compendium, i., 16: ‘Ita Deus est in irrationabilibus 


creaturis ut non capiatur ab ipsis.’—Cf. Epist. ad Can. Grand. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 309 


blest existences almost lost upon the borders of nothingness.! 
These magnificent visions had often visited the anchorites of the 
desert and the sages of the cloister in their meditations; but, 
rapid and fleeting, they had passed as passes the electric flash. 
Dante succeeded in fixing them, and in making their brightness 
descend forever into the marvellous structure of the Divine 
Comedy. 

Asceticism is the practical study of man, the science of sancti- 
fication. We have already seen cayise to believe that the Italian 
poem contains a complete ascetic system. We can entertain no 
doubt upon this matter if we compare with it works of the same 
kind, by no meansrare in the Middle Ages. The legend contained 
under the descriptions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, is the 
story of man, withdrawn from the sombre thicket of terrestrial 
interests and passions, and led back, by means of the considera- 
tion of himself, of the world, and of the Divinity, into the way of 
salvation. Christian, as well as pagan science, begins by the 
[vodt oexvtoy; it analyzes the entire economy of sin, of penitence, 
and of virtue. If it glances at theexternal world, it is that it may 


therein recognize dangers for man and glory for God. And if it 





1 Pionys. Areop., de Calesti Hierarch. and de Eccles. Fieranene 
passim.—Cf. Parad., xxviii., xxix., passim, ii.,42, etc.; Convito, ii.,5., ete. 
See, on the whole subject of this transcendental theology, the Precis de 
Vhistoire de la philosophie, p. 217, 


310 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


reveals the Creator, it is less by the effort of thought than by the 
merit of desire : the interior revelations thus made, not only satisfy 
the understanding, but they impel the will and direct it in the 
way of endless progress.'_ The work of Dante, thus reduced to a 
signification severe but indubitable, merely reproduces the lessons 
taught by those who professed the cure of souls, from the fathers of 
the Thebaid, whose sayings have been reported to us by Cassian, 
down to St. Bonaventura, whose lessons reduced to doctrine that 
which had been related of the transports and ecstasies of St. 
Francis. It was in the same school that Dante acquired many of 
his most interesting modes of viewing things, as for instance the 
relations between error and vice, between knowledge and virtue ; 
the genealogical order of the capital sins,’ the reciprocal action 


of the physical and the moral structure of man, whence result 





1 gt. Augustine, de Quantit. Anime.—St. Bernard, de Consideratione, 
de Interiore Domo.—Richard of St. Victor, de Gratia Contempl.—St. 
Bonaventura, Itinerar. mentis ad Deum.--Cf. Inferno, i., 11; Purgatorio, 
passim, xxxiii. 

2 The classification of the capital sins, which in itself implies the question 
of the origin of moral evil, for along time varied in theological teach- 
ing. (See Cassian, Collatio vy. and St. Thomas, prima secunde, q. 84.) 
It is found as set forth by Dante, in the writings of St. Gregory the Great, 
Moral., xxxi. 31.—Hugh of St. Victor, in Matth.. 3-5.—St. Bonaventura, 


Compendium, iii., 14.—Cf. Purgatorio, xvii., 32, 


In the Thirteenth Century. an 


two parallel theories which explain the indications of the human 
countenance and the effects of mortification.’ In fine, analogies 
are to be found even in the general form of the Divine Comedy, 
which, when describing the pilgrimage of its author through the 
spheres of heaven (the seat of as many distinct virtues) up to the 
feet of the Almighty, recalls the favorite titles of the treatises of 
St. Bonaventura: ‘Itinerary of the Soul toward God; Golden 
Ladder of Virtues; the Seven Ways of Eternity.” ? 

In fact, those pious contemplatives, who seemed as if they had 
irrevocably laid aside the weaknesses of this nether world, never- 
theless consented to adorn the austerity of their ideas with all 
the graces of expression, whether through a merciful condescen- 
sion toward their disciples, or through that natural attraction 
which they who are good feel toward that which is beautiful. 


They retained an affectionate sympathy for the whole of creation, 





1 St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 57-59. These three chapters con- 
tain all the elements of a system of physiognomy and craniology. It 
might be curious to compare it with the systems of Gall and Spurzheim 
(Cf. Convito, i., 8, etc.). But, if phrenology would escape fatalism, it 
must lead to mortification. Phrenologically speaking, if the passions are to 
be restrained within just limits, this must be accomplished by employing hy- 
gienic methods, that is, abstinences, to arrest the extreme development of 
their organs. 

2 St. Bonaventura, Itinerarium mentis ad Deumi; Formula aurea de 
gradibus virtutum ; De vii., itineribus ceternitatis. 


312 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


which they no longer regarded in its actual state of degradation, 
but in the primordial purity of the divine plan. It assumed to 
them the aspect of a luxuriant foliage, soon borne away by the 
wind of death, but meanwhile affording shade and freshness, 
and thus bearing witness to Providence.’ Still oftener they saw 
in ita sister, who, only in another fashion, expressed the same 
thoughts that occurred to themselves and sang the same love. 
This is why they borrowed from it frequent comparisons, dis- 
covered sacred harmonies, and indicated previously undiscerned 
relations between things foreign to one another in appearance 
and scattered over the extremities of space. They did the same 
within the domain of time: centuries, events, and men, were for 
them merely prophecy and its fulfilment, voices alternately 
questioning and answering, figures mutually repeating one an- 
other. Distances were obliterated; the past and the future in- 
terchanged and mingled in an endless present. Thence the ad- 
mirable Christian symbolism which embraces both nature and 
history, which binds together all visible things by considering 


them as shadows of the things that are not seen; ? an energetic 





1 Hugh of St. Victor, in Eeclesiast. ‘Species rerum visibilium folia 
sunt quze modo quidem pulchra apparent, sed cadent subito cum turbo 
exierit....Dum stant tamen umbram faciunt et habent refrigerium 
suum.’’—Cf. Paradiso, xxvVi., 22. 

2 St. Paul, Romans, i., 20. ‘* For the invisible things of Him, from the 
creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things 
that are made.” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 31 


Oro 


language, of which all the terms are realities, and all the words 
significant facts; a learned and sacred tongue, having its tradi- 
tions and its rules, spoken in the temple, and sometimes translated 
into the speech of stone or canvas, of monuments or edifices. 
The poet learned it from the lips of priests, and when he repeats 
it to our profane ears, we scarcely compreliend; we regard as so 
many daring flights of genius the images which for him were 
simply so many familiar reminiscences. God represented, now 
as circumference and again as centre, as an illimitable sea envel- 
oping the empyrean, or as an indivisible point around which the 
universe revolves: '—creatures compared to a series of mirrors, 
whereon fall, and whence are reflected, the rays of the uncreated 
sun: ?—the divers states of the soul personified: the theological 
virtues by the three Apostles, Peter, James, and John; and the two 
lives, the active and the contemplative, by Martha and Mary, Lia 


and Rachel: *—the emblems of the eagle and the lion whereun- 





1 St. John Damascene; St. Bonaventura, Compendium, ii., 15; Para- 
diso, i., 88; xxviii., 6. 

2 Dionys. Areopag., de Divin. Nomin.—St Bernard, de inter. Domo, 
xiii. *‘ Preecipuum et principale speculum ad yidendum est animus ra- 
tionalis inveniens seipsum.’’—Cf. Paradiso, xiii., 18. Bp. ad Can. Grand. 

3 St. Bernard, de Assumpt. Serm. iii.—Richard of St. Victor, de Prev- 
paratione Anime, i.—St. Bonaventura, in Lucam, viii. *‘* Petrus qui 
interpretatur agnoscens designat fidem; Jacobus qui luctator, spem:; 
Johannes qui, in quo est gratia, charitatem.’’—Cf. Conyito, iv., 22; Purga- 
torio, Xxvii.; Paradiso, xxivy.-xxy. 


314 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


der we recognize the two natures in Christ; the tree of the cross 
blent with the tree in the terrestrial paradise; Eden as a figure 
of the Church militant; the statue of Nabuchodonosor, a type of 
the progressive decadence of humanity.!_ This bold style of the 
Florentine muse is indeed that employed by the Church, when 
from her pulpits she pacified the mettlesome courage of our an- 
cestors: it is that wherewith the St. Bernards and the St. Thom- 
ases of Canterbury thrilled the people and made kings tremble. 

3. And yet, as we have already seen, if the learning of the 
Middle Ages divided its veneration between St. Bonaventura and 
St. Thomas, the last named, perhaps through his merit, perhaps 
through the reputation of superiority enjoyed by the order of St. 
Dominic, obtained a more decided ascendency over the multitude 
of studious minds. St. Thomas called up memories of Aristotle 
by the universality cf his knowledge, the solid gravity of lis 
character, by Lis talent for analysis and classification, and by the 
extreme sobriety of his language. His intervention had placed 
upon a sure foundation the long contested authority of the Stagy- 
rite, toward whom he was led, independently of his own personal 
inclination, by the influence of the great family of dogmatic phil- 


osophers (Albert the Great, Alexander of Hales, John of Salis- 





1 St. Bonaventura, in Psalm., 1.,90.—In Lucam, 13.—Sermo de Invent. 
Crucis.—Richard, de Hrudit. int. hom.,i.,1.—Cf. Purgatorio, xxvii.- 
Xxxii.; Inferno, xiv. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 315 


bury) from which he was himself descended. In fact, the roots 
of scholastic dogmatism were laid in Peripatetic ontology and 
logic. But the vigorous trunk of Christian revelation engrafted _ 
on these roots had borne essentially new fruits: the primal arid- 
ity of sensism was corrected by the flow of a better sap; relig- 
ious feeling circulated through the dry veins, vivifying both ra- 
tional conceptions and sensible truths. This growth could not 
escape the penetrating glance of Dante, and the thorns by which 
it was surrounded were not such as to arrest his robust grasp. 
The philosophy of St. Thomas and of his school consists less 
in the principal theses advanced, which indeed belong to theology, 
than in the proofs by which they are supported, the chain of 
reasoning by which they are connected together, and the conse- 
quences to be drawn from them; all which things are difficult to 
convey ina rapid summary. We may, however, readily perceive 
a constant progression from the abstract to the concrete, from the 
simple to the multiple, which progression naturally divides itself 
into four series: the science of being. the science of God, the sci- 


ence of spirits. and the science of man.! 

1 This too brief analysis is nearly that of the Summa contra Gentes by 
St. Thomas, and of the first half (prima et prima secunde@)of his Summa 
Theologig. Metaphvsies is found occupying a certain placein the The- 
odicy, that isto say. that before proving the goodness of God, good in gen- 
eral is treated : f : hefore demonstrating His veracity. the trve is defined ; 
each one of the abstract qualities is examined as it bears relation to some 
divine attribute. In the same wav, pneumatology is sometimes mingled 
with anthropology : the soul as united to the body is treated of before it is 
separately considered. However, in general, the logical order is carefully 
observed, and ideas follow one another as we have indicated. 


316 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


The science of being in general took its starting point in the no- 
tions of substance, form, matter, etc., so learnedly elaborated by 
the Peripatetics ; but it did not stop there; it deduced from these, 
notions more exact and more living Being, passing through a 
series of rigorous deductions, became successively goodness, unity, 
truth. Already, amid the nebulous atmosphere of abstractions, 
the divine attributes began to appear and to trace their own out- 
lines. Unity, the common condition of all existences; Truth, 
the sovereign good of intelligences; Good, the term of all the ten- 
dencies of nature and of all thinking wills, essentially distinct from 
evil, which is not merely the absence, but the privation and the 
loss of good.! 

Thus, between pantheism and dualism, a safe way opened out 
whereby natural theology might enter. Supported both on the 
axioms of causality and necessity, and on the phenomena of 


daily observation, it arrived at the demonstration of the existence 





1 Summa Theologia, prima, q. 11; q. 16,1: ‘* Verum est terminus in- 
tellectus sicut bonum appetitus.” (The True is the term of the intel- 
lect, as the Good isthe term of the appetite.)—q. 5,3. ““Omnre ens in 
quantum ens, est bonum.”? (Every being, as such, is good.)—q. 6, 1: 
‘““Omnia appetendo proprias perfectiones appetunt ipsum Deum.” (All 
things in desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself.)—q. 14, 10: 
‘*Malum non est negatio pura, sed privatio boni.’’ (Evil is not pure nega- 
tion, but privation of good.)—Cf. Inferno, iii., 6; Paradiso, xxvi., 6; Convi- 


to, iv., 12, 22, ete. 


In the Thirteenth Century. Bn7, 


of God.' Itseemed difficult to go farther, the indivisibility of 
God not allowing us to isolate His perfections for the purpose 
of studying them successively; but, by a bold reversion, this 
very indivisibility was taken as a generating principle of all 
the combined perfections issuing from it; immutability, eternity, 
goodness, justice, beatitude; and these were considered as so 
many terms of a continuous equation always representing, 
under different names, the totality of the divine essence.? Thus 
were avoided the dangers of anthropomorphism and of polythe- 
ism, which attributed to God all the infirmities and ineoherencies 
of a human personality: at the same time, approaches were 
made toward the dogma of the Trinity, in which we find 
existing (in an entirely mysterious way) as Persons, the Father, 
the Word, and the Holy Spirit—Power, Wisdom, and Love. 
This mystery, incomprehensible as it may be, was connected with 
that of creation, of which it explained the mode and the motive: 
the motive, for Love determined Power to realize that which 


Wisdom had conceived ; the mode, for all things, by the sole fact 








1 Summa Theologig, prima, q. 2, 2, 3.—Cf. Paradiso, xxiv., 44.— 
Epist. ad Can. Grand. 

2 Summa Theolog., prima, q. 3,4: “ Deus cum sit primum efficiens et 
actus purus et ens simpliciter primum, essentiam indistinctam ab esse 
habet.”’ (As God is the first effector, absolute act, and first simple being, 
there isin Him no distinction between essence and existence.) Q. 4, 2; 
q. 13. And Summa contra Gentes i., lib., I., passim. 


318 Dante and Catholic Philosophy 


that they exist, that they obey a law, that they concur in a de- 
termined order, bear, as it were, some trace of the Father, of the 
Word, and of the Holy Spirit. In intelligent creatures, this trace 
(or footprint), of which they are themselves conscious, is more 
recognizable, and becomes an image.! 

Among such creatures, those not associated with matter, that 
is, the angels, good and-bad, and the separated souls, whatever 
their destiny of expiation, of chastisement, or of recompense, be- 
came the objects of a special study. We cannot sufficiently ad- 
nire the boldness with which this study, without the aid of the 
senses or of the imagination, by the sole power of the reason, en- 


tered into consideration of these unknown beings, accompanied 
them through all the conditions of their incorporeal existeace, de- 


termined their characters, their functions, their relations, and 





1 Summa Theolog., prima, q. 44,4: ‘‘ Primo agenti non convenit agere 
propter acquisitionem alicujus finis, sed intendit solum communicare 
suam perfectionem.’’ (It does not belong to the Primal Agent to act 
for the acquisition of some end, but He intends merely to communicate 
His perfection.)—Cf. Paradiso, xxix., 5.—Q. 45, 6,7: ‘In rationalibus 
creaturis est imago Trinitatis, in ceteris vero creaturis est vestigium.” 
(In rational creatures is found the image of the Trinity, whereas in the 


other creatures is found Its footprint.) Cf. Paradiso, xxix.,6; xiii., 19; 
vii., 25. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 319 


finally, passing beyond the last bounds of certainty, penetrated 
even into the realm of probabilities.! 

Man, a whole composed of soul and body, incomplete if one of 
these parts be lacking, sufficed to fill out the limits of an entire 
science ; we called it anthropology, but the science is older than 
its name. It found, at the outset, two errors to destroy: one, 
which tended to multiply souls in each individual, the other, to 
allow of but one soul common to the whole species.” Then it 
undertook to analyze the complex facts of human activity, and to 
distinguish the divers powers which they manifest. The above- 
named science sometimes recognized three of these powers, 
nutritive, sensitive, and rational, and again it divided them into 
two, which it named apprehensive and appetitive. The apprehen- 
sive power was the intellect, which by turns active or passive, was 
viewed as enlightened from on high by the rays of the divine 


reason, or from below by the light derived from sensations.* The 





1 Summa Theolog., prima, qq. 50-64; 106-114.—Inferno,i., 39; and 
Purgatorio, Paradiso, passim. 

2 Summa Theolog., prima, q. 76,3: ‘*Impossibile est in homine esse 
plures animas. Apparent per hoc quod una operatio animee, cum fuerit 
intensa, impedit aliam.” (It is impossible that there should be a plurality 
of soulsin man. The fact that one operation of the soul, when intense, 
impedes another, shows the principle of its operations to be essentially 
one.)—Cf. Purgatorio, iv., 2, 8.—Q. 79, 5. Cf. Purgatorio, xxv., 22. 

3 Summa Theolog., prima, q. 78-79: ‘* Ratio superior est quae intendit 
seternis conspiciendis.”’ (The superior reason is that which contemplates 
the eternal things which are to be discovered.)—12, 12: ** Naturalis nostra 
cognitio a sensu principium sumit.’’ (Our natural knowledge takes its 
beginning from the senses.)—Cf. Purgatorio, xviii., xxv.; Paradiso, iy., 14. 


320 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ap petitive power comprised the natural appetite, which is ignorant 
of itself ; the sensitive appetite, which is irascible or concupiscible ; 
the rational appetite, which is the will: to these three kinds of 
appetite corresponded the three kinds of love. The will, necessar- 
ily impelled to seek good, that is, felicity, had received from God 
a primordial impulsion in this direction; but the means of reach- 
ing the desired end are left to the free will, which can be con- 
strained neither by the counsels of reason, by the seductions of 
the senses, nor by the influence of celestial bodies.! Free will, 
essential to all natures endowed with intelligence, then exercised 
its power of choice, electing either sin or virtue. To avoid sin 
and to aequire virtue, became the labor of the whole of life; but 
this work, common to all, was to be accomplished in the bosom of 
society, consequently, under the rule of law. The eternal and 
sovereign law was presumed to dwell in the Divine Reason, which 
regulates the relations of things and co-ordinates them to their end. 
From this source emanated the authority of jiuman laws, just and 
obligatory, under the threefold reserve, not to exceed the due 
limits of power, to procure the well-being of the’ community, and 


to distribute proportionally rights and burdens. 





1 Summa Theolog., prima, qq. 80-83, 115; prima secunds, q. 27, 2: 
“ Appetibile movet appetitum faciens quodam modo in eo ejus intentionem,” 
etc.; A passage translated verbatim, Purgatorio, xviii., 8.—Cf. lbid., xvii., 


31; Convito, iii., 3. 


»~& 
Ln the Thirteenth Century. 321 
For political equity being the consequence of natural fraternity, 
it was plainly asserted that God had not created two Adams, one 
of precious metal, from whom the nobles were descended, and the 
other of clay, the father of the plebeians.'_ Beyond the societies of 
this earth, the kingdom of heaven was shown as a consoling per- 
spective. The dogma of future immortality and the definition of 
man as it had been recorded, formed two premises whence resulted 
as a final and glorious consequence, the doctrine of the resurrec- 
tion of the body.” 
Now, of these four great series of philosophical conceptions, the 
first two are found, although fragmentary and somewhat con- 
founded together, in Dante’s work; expressed or unexpressed, 


but everywhere present, they are its soul. The last two may be 





1 St. Thomas, de Erud. princ.,i.,4: ‘Ab uno omnes originem habe- 
mus. Non legitur Deus fecisse unum hominem argenteum ex quo nobiles, 
unum luteum ex quo ignobiles.”” Summa Theolog., prima secund, 91- 
96. ‘These bold principles are also those of St. Bonaventura, Serm. iii., 
Domin. 12 post Pentecost. It is curious to find them developed at length 
in a political work written by the preceptor of Philip the Fair, who prof- 
itedillby them: B. #gidii Column, de Regimine principum. See 
especially 1. iii., p. ii., cap. viii. and xxxiii., two very remarkable chap- 
ters on public instruction and on the middle classes.—Cf. Dante, de Mon- 
archia, ii.; Convito, iv., 14,15; Paradiso, viii. 

2 Summa contra Gentes, lib. iv., 79.—Cf. Paradiso, Vii., 23-49; xiv., 15; 


Inferno, Vi., 35. 


Bey 
222 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 
said to constitute its body. What is, indeed, the very framework 
of the poem, if not an exploration of the immaterial world, where- 
in figure all its inhabitants, with their darkness and their light, 
their passions and their affections, their providential ministry ;— 
from the lord of the lower regions and his reprobate subjects, to 
the loftiest choirs of seraphs? Moreover, does not a continual 
reversion of thought lead the poet from the apparitions of the life 
to come back to the things of our terrestrial existence? And 
have we not already amply set forth the main features of the 
anthropological system enclosed by him within the cycle of his 
fabled pilgrimages ? 

4. In placing himself under the auspices of both St. Bonaventura 
and St. Thomas, Dante merely carried out the felicitous impulse 
which had led him to yield by turns to the influences of Platon- 
ism and of Aristotelianism. If he had believed in the possibility 
of a reconciliation between the two princes of the Greek schools, 
he found the same completely realized in regard to the most re- 
vered masters of mysticism and of dogmatism. He beheld them, 
free from all pride and rivalry, encouraged by the serious and 
benevolent habits of thought prevalent in their day, put an end 
to old disputes, and, by a conciliatory decision, resolve the famous 
problem of universals, which in many respects represented the 
points at issue between the Academicians and the Peripateties. 


Universals, forms, or ideas (for in the language of St, Bonaven- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 323 


tura and St. Thomas these three terms seemed to have become 
synonymous) can be considered in God, in things, and in the 
human mind. Ideas exist in God as designs and types, as prin- 
ciples of existence and of the faculty of knowing. They are there 
eternal; they are in the divine essence as the branch is on the 
tree, the bee in the flower, the honey in the comb; we may say 
that in a certain way they are even God Himself.’ In things, 
the idea, or universal form. is found only as reduced to the con- 
dition of the individual, it is objectively inseparable from the 
material circumstances which individualize it; but matter itself 
would be useless, and the individual would not exist, without the 
universal form which gives to it a mode of being, and classes it 
under a species and a genus. Finally, the human mind can ab- 
stract the universal from the determinate matter under which it 
is contained; the intellect seizes upon the character of universal- 


ity at the same time that the representation of the individual ob- 


1 Summa Theolog., prima, q. 15.—‘'Necesse est ponere in mente divina 
ideas. Cum ide a Platone ponerentur principia cognitionis rerum et 
generationis ipsarum, ad utrumque se habet idea prout in mente divina 
ponitur....’°—St. Bonaventura, Compendium, i., 25. ‘Ides sunt forms 
principales rerum que in mente divina continentur. Idea moraliter lo- 
quendo, est multipliciter in Deo; scilicet sicut ramus in arbore, apis in 


flore, mel in favo, avicula in nido, quzelibet res in sibi propria.” 


324 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ject strikes the senses.' Dante, when adhering to this theory, 
was at once a wise realist avoiding the sterile multiplication of 
imaginary beings, and a conceptualist with broad views who 


could not be confined within the limitations of tangible verities. 





1 St. Bonaventura, in Magist. Sentent., 1, d. 5, art. 2, q. 1: ‘* Univer- 
sale de se non generantur nisi in individuo; est tamen ipsum universale 
secundum quod principaliter intenditur a generante.’’—St. Thomas, Opus- 
cul. de Sensu respectu particularium, et Intellectu respectu universal- 
ium. This treatise, most important in the history of philosophy, ought to 
be more widely known. It may be judged of by the brief extract which 
follows: * In things material and corporeal, the individuation of the com- 
mon nature arises from the bodily matter contained under determinate 
dimensions. But the universal is constituted by abstraction from that 
sort of matter and from iudividuating material conditions. It therefore 
follows that the similitude of the thing which is received in the senses, rep- 
resents the thing, inasmuch as it is, as singular, but, received in the in- 
tellect. it represeuts the thing according to the essence of its universal na- 
ture.... But, the nature itself of which we can predicate this aspect of 
universality, has a duplex being: one, indeed, material, according as it 
exists in material nature; but the other immaterial, according as it exists 
in the intellect. Verily the conception of the universal cannot come 
from the first mentioned mode of being, because there the nature is indi- 
vidualized by matter. Therefore the conception of the universal arises 
inasmuch as abstraction is made from the individual matter: but the na- 
ture cannot be abstracted from the individual matter really, as the Pla- 


tonists asserted.’? See Appendix, No. 1. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 325 


However, we should form an erroneous judgment of Dante and 
of his masters, if we saw in them merely the continuers and 
reconcilers of the philosophieal sects of Paganism. Doubtless, 
Christianity, with the inflexibility of its dogmas and the respect 
professed by it for the liberty of human opinions, afforded a sure 
criterion and the power of a wide choice, two propitious condi- 
tions for the founding of a real eclecticism. But this was not all: 
the vice of, and at the same time the excuse for, the wisdom of 
antiquity, lay in the profound doubt which it presumed. Essen- 
tial truths, God, duty, immortality, reached it only athwart the 
fragments of tradition and the ruins of conscience; they thus 
were readily misknown and reduced to the condition of simple 
conjectures; it was then needful that the wisdom of the time 
_ should make these matters the subjects of long, patient, and labor- 
ious researches; and these researches, grounded upon fallible 
reasoning, could lead only to uncertain results. Thence the self- 
mistrust betrayed by the most beautiful doctrines, the constant 
need felt of re-discussing principles not certainly established ; time 
and genius absorbed by a small number of metaphysical and moral 
problems; questions of detail and the secondary sciences left al- 
together in oblivion. On the contrary, Christianity reproduced 
the truths so ardently pursued in the meditations of the learned; 
it reproduced them, not only in their primitive purity, but with a 


new energy, and they became exact, strict, unwavering. <Ac- 


326 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


cepted by faith, reason could no longer doubt them without crim- 
inality; known to all, no one thought of renewing the search for 
them: nothing then remained except to study their mutual har- 
mony, to pursue their developments, and to deduce truths of an 
inferior order: the security acquired in regard to general prin- 
ciples gave to the intelligence the liberty required to occupy 
itself with the applications, and this security of religious belief 
allowed of advancing, with sure steps and without looking back- 
wards, into the furthermost paths of the profane sciences. Thus, 
pagan philosophy was a philosophy of investigation, losing itself 
in endless generalities amid the prolegomena of an ever incom- 
plete encyclopedic system. Christian philosophy, entirely of dem- 
onstration, led to precise, detailed, and fruitful researches: taking 
hold of the two leading ideas, God and the soul, it freed them 
from all alloy of error, and laid the foundations of theodicy and 
psychology; it prepared leisure for those who would one day 
observe nature, and instruction for those who might be called 
to reform society; it has truly accomplished that which Bacon 
named the grand restoration of human knowledge. If then the 
systems of antiquity seemed in some respects to be continued in 
dogmatism and in mysticism, among the realists and the concept- 
ualists, it was that they might draw near to one another, and take 
on a new life under the conciliatory and vivifying action of the 
new faith. The general tendencies of the age favored this result: 
Dante, the faithful disciple of his epoch before becoming its mas- 


ter, could then be none other than a Christian eclectic. 


CHAPTER IV. 


ANALOGY BETWEEN THE PHILOSOPHY OF DANTE AND MODERN 
PHILOSOPHY.—EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM. 


Sy 7 is doubtless a fine sight to behold the learned schools of Asia, 
i] Greece, and western Europe, environing the Italian poet with 
their memories and their authority, thereby resembling the 
illustrious shades with whom, at his first entrance into the 
nether regions, he represents himself as holding discourse not to 
be divulged.! We delight in seeing the exile, through the magic 
of his learning, evoke around him this magnificent assemblage: 
we never weary of admiring how, amid the obstacles which still 


rendered study so laborious and so meritorious, his mind could 





1 Inferno, iv., 33. 

When they together had discoursed somewhat, 
They turned to me with signs of salutation, 
And on beholding this, my master smiled ; 

And more of honor still, much more, they did me, 
In that they made me one of their own band ; 
So that the sixth was I, ’mid so much wit. 

Thus we went on as far as to the light, 
Things saying tis becoming to keep silent, 


As was the saying of them where I was. 
327 


328 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


grasp and retain, gather together and set in order, so many con- 
ceptions, maxims, and symbols: we are almost appalled when we 
contemplate the intellectual past of the Middle Ages, perhaps in- 
deed that of the whole human race, thus accumulated in a single 
mind. However, in this we find but one-half of that which con- 
stitutes the task of a great man: he must sum up the past with 
all the power of an original way of thinking, and transcend the 
present by preparing the future. He is like one of the seers, 
depositaries of tradition and prophecy, raised up of old by Heaven 
to bind the centuries that have elapsed with those about to begin. 
While thus uniting the ages together, he overtops them, he escapes 
the oblivion which marches on behind them, and thus becomes 
immortal. What then is the personal glory of Dante? What is 
the especial value of his philosophy, that which distinguishes it 
from the teachings which preceded it, and recommends it to the 
attention of posterity 2? We shall endeavor to elucidate this point. 

1. Two different characters of genius appear in the history of 
the human mind: the genius of methods, and the genius of dis- 
coveries. Thence arise two kinds of great minds. Those of the 
first species point out ways and propose researches; those of the 
second find facts, laws, or causes. The latter add new knowledge 
to the learning of their age, which they thus enrich by addition ; 
the former feeundate it for centuries to come, and extend it by 


the way of multiplication. As the individual sciences have to 


In the Thirteenth Century. 329 


establish certain truths which especially pertain to them, it is in 
their service that the discoverers of facts are ordinarily met with : 
and as the particular call of philosophy seems to be to conduct the 
sciences themselves in their common effort toward the attainment 
of truth, it is to philosophy that principally belong the masters of 
methods. Among these masters in later times we count three 
famous names: Bacon, Descartes, and Leibnitz, respectively the 
authors of the Novwm Organum, the Dissertatio de Methodo recte 
regende Rationis, and the treatise, L’ Amendement de la philosophie 
premiere. To this class belonged Dante; and whatever light he 
may have thrown upon various points, his great merit is, to have 
acted upon all points at once, by causing philosophy to step out 
of the scholastic ruts within which it was confining itself, and by 
impressing upon it a more vigorous practical direction. 

It is true, as we have already seen, that there always had been 
in the Italian character a twofold inclination, a tendency toward 
the Beautiful as well as toward the Good, toward both the poetic 
form and the ethical application. But these instincts, still timid, 
hesitated to bring about their own satisfaction. Philosophers oc- 
casionally yielded to the seductions of the muse, but then they 
laid aside the doctor’s cap; and when poets philosophized, they 
cast far from them their laurel crowns. Or perhaps, some tech- 
nical sentence might be versified according to the Virgilian metre, 


some Platonic idea furtively creep into the fugitive stanzas of a 


330 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


sonnet. The language of science, as we have seen, was the lan- 
guage of Aristotle. From the days of Charlemagne onward, it 
had not ceased to reign in the school, severe, imprisoning thought 
within its categories, and words within its syllogisms. The four 
figures and the nineteen modes of syllogistic reasoning were the 
only rhythms which it allowed, while the monotonous cadence of 
premises and conclusion formed the sole harmony in which it took 
pleasure. On the other hand, if sundry treatises upon economics 
and ethics had been penned by Italians, if the scholastic doctors had 
accomplished great things for the perfecting of the individual, and 
the sages of the olden time much for the prosperity of the nations, 
these partial works remained without a mutual bond, and conse- 
quently without their due influence. In this period of the Middle 
Ages which may be compared to a fervid adolescence, enthusiasm 
regarding theories left small place for care about action, and 
science, surprised at her own developments, was absorbed in the 
contemplation of herself. We have seen noted in previous chap- 
ters some remarkable exceptions to this state of things, but habits 
so general and so deeply rooted could not be shaken by the pass- 
ing efforts of a few chosen minds. Some great shock was needed, 
a bold, prolonged, and widely extended impulse, such as Dante 
was capable of giving. 

2. To begin with, if he retained portions of the Peripatetic ter- 


minology and classification in order to be intelligible to men whom 


In the Thirteenth Century. 331 


long usage had attached to these forms [and also because these 
forms best expressed his own ideas — 77.], he offered no other sac- 
rifices to the ¢dol adored around him under the name of logic. 
The veneration of the idol was attacked by him in so far as it 
savored of superstition. He contested the absolute infallibility 
of the syllogism; the truth of the conclusion appeared to him 
accidental, so to speak, certainly dependent upon the absolute 
correctness of the two propositions whence it resulted. Hence 
he proposed an examination into the specious majors and minors 
which circulated through the schools as so many indubitable 
axioms and certain facts. The study of words was forced to 
give way to the study of things. Consequently, dialectics was 
reduced to the oceupation of a lower, narrower, and more 
modest place in the hierarchy of human learning, while the abuses 
introduced into instruction under its protection were duly pointed 
out. But, as the faults in instruction and in dialecties were all 
derived from vices common to human nature, it became necessary 
to combat also these last, whether they had their origin in the 
mind or in the heart—presumption, pusillanimity, frivolity, and 
all the passions springing from pride or from sensuality. The 
ever-living causes of the errors of every age thus became plainly 
visible. Dante did not shrink from the consequences; having 
followed these out to their end. he was well aware that in disap- 


proving of received rules, he incurred the obligation of supplying 


332 Dante, and Catholic Philosopiry 


better ones. He did so, and uttered, not in systematic order, 
but under the free inspiration of his genius, those short and 
fruitful maxims wherein he began by prescribing the precise de- 
termination of the limits of reason and the extirpation of the 
roots of prejudice; then he inculcated the observation of facts, 
prudence in reasoning, persistency in sustained meditation, and 
finally, the discernment of the divers modes of certitude proper 
to the different orders of ideas.! All this does not suffice for us 
to attribute to the poet a formal and complete plan of effecting an 
intellectual revolution, but it is more than is needed to indicate a 
remarkable attempt, a stepping-stone, which, subsequently more 
firmly fixed by the efforts of Gerson, Hrasmus, Ramus, Louis 
Vives, was enabled to serve as a fulerum for the still more sue- 
cessful efforts made by the English chancellor, Bacon. Little 
resemblance as existed between these two in their political lives 
and in their religious faith, the proud exile from Florence and the 
disgraced courtier of Verulam nevertheless met in a common des- 
tiny of misfortune and of fame. Both condemned by society, in 
their turn passed judgment upon it, denounced the idols adored 
by it, charged it with its errors, and showed it the methods that 
were to lead it to scientific results greater than it had ever hoped 


for. If the first of the two was the less heeded, it was, perhaps, 





1 See above, Part II., Chap. iii. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 333 


because the world, frequently disturbed by false alarms, had long 
before resolved to answer only to the second call. 

Dante, however, was to accomplish still more. Like the sage 
of old, who, to confound the objections of sophists against the 
possibility of movement, rose up and walked in their presence, he 
showed by his example that it was possible for philosophy to 
move outside of the limitations within which it had until then been 
confined. He stripped from it the colorless, stiff, and ofttimes 
wearisome garb of the scholastic method, invested it with all the 
glory of epic poetry, and gave to it the flexible and unconstrained 
charms of the language of the people. Thus he placed his legiti- 
mate revolt under the protection of national self-love. He real- 
ized his pious desire of being able to offer the sacred bread of 
instruction to such as were (so to speak) mere weanlings,! to all 
who by the lowliness of their origin, the multiplicity of their oc- 
cupations, or the weakness of their moral temperament, might be 
withheld from the banquet of the wise and learned. But espec- 
ially did he victoriously establish the liberty of thought, by mak- 
ing it bend according to its will the power of words, to which it 
had too long been subservient. He proved the reciprocal independ- 
ence existing between the doctrines and the jorms of the school, 


and thus barred the contempt which might one day fall upon tlie 





1 Convito, i., 1. See also the letter from Fr. Ilario to Uguecione della 
Faggiuola, found in several editions of Dante. 


334 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


former by reason of their presumed solidarity with the latter. 
Thus did he simultaneously struggle against the exaggerations of 
his own time and the unjust judgments of posterity. 

The inspiration which makes poets leads them back to the 
heaven whence it descended. By its means, they sometimes, 
without trouble or reckoning, reach the loftiest heights of meta- 
physics. Novy, as all the sciences rest on facts infinitely varied, 
and rise by degrees to the sole First Cause, we may say that 
taken together they shape themselves into a pyramid of which 
metaphysics forms the apex. From the topmost point, where 
they all meet, one glance around suffices to take in all their 
faces: principles are seen to be in common, while external phe- 
nomena differ. This is why the majority of the great discoveries 
have been made, @ priori, by a sudden intuition, by the consider- 
ation of final causes, by analogy, by hypotheses which their au- 
thors had no time to verify. This is why the mysties, reasoning 
from God to man, and from man to matter, often had presenti- 
ments of those laws of nature of which the complete revelation 
was reserved to later ages. He who penned the Divine Comedy 
seems to have experienced something similar. Sundry commen- 
tators, carried perhaps somewhat too far by the charm pertaining 
to marvellous origins, have thought to find in his lines the germs 
of the most fruitful conceptions of physiology : the circulation of 


the blood, the configuration of the brain, organic lesions brought. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 335 


into relation with the order and the perturbations of the faculties 
of the soul. But we cannot contest his claim to other sug- 
gestions more felicitous. When he shows the universality of 
beings, surrounded, attracted on every side, and, as it were, 
dilated by love, which communicates to them a ceaseless rotation ; 
the mutual action and reaction of the heavens; weight contracting 
the terrestrial globe and causing heavy bodies to fall upon it; 
we might say that he had had a glimpse into the mechanical com- 
binations of the forces which move the world and of the law of 
universal attraction which Newton was to read in the skies. The 
need for a symmetrical construction leads him to presume in 
another hemisphere the existence of those unknown lands on 
which Christopher Columbus wili one day set foot. Or again, 
his conjectures induce him to suspect ancient catastrophes which 
have changed the face of the earth, antediluvian revolutions in 
the condition of the ocean, and deep seats of fire warming the’ 
soil beneath our feet. He does not reach the hypothesis of a cen- 
tral fire, for he gives to our globe a nucleus of ice, thus sporting, 
five hundred years in advance, among the varying systems that 
eeology was to give rise to, from Buffon to Cuvier. 

The effort toward a reform in the use of logic, and the sketch- 
ing out of a new method ; the freedom of the intellect reconquered, 
and its first exercise recompensed by an insight into sundry truths 


on which depended the entire progress of the physical sciences ; 


336 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


—these are the services which associate Dante with the growth 
of modern empiricism. But he well knew how to avoid its ab- 
errations ; he kept far away from the paths whereby, in later 
times, the crowd of men plunged deeply into the slough of ma- 
terialistic doctrines and utilitarian systems. 

3. A better star guided him, or rather, he was occupied with 
nobler cares. Religion and sorrow, those two good counsellors, 
induced him to look beyond the scenes of earth and material 
needs, toward the things pertaining to the future life. There it 
was that he perceived the reason for this terrestrial existence, 
the sanction of the decrees of conscience, the realization of happi- 
ness or misery contained beforehand in our merits and our de- 
merits, in short, the final goal of human life and action. The 
guidance of such life and action must thence appear to him the 
sole reasonable employment of our knowledge. Not only did he 
attach to the mysterious visions of his poem a whole ascetic 
theory of moral perfection, but he brought to bear upon this 
theory studies the most varied and apparently the most foreign 
to it. Taking death as his point of view, he conceived the plan 
of a philosophy of life: he made this the centre and the bond of 
union of all his subsequent researches ; he made of it a universal 
science. Now, this practical wisdom, this positive side of knowl- 
edge, is precisely what distinguished the two celebrated schools 


of the seventeenth century; that of Descartes, whence issued 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 227 


Nicole, Bossuet, and Fénelon; and that of Leibnitz, in which the 
German mind was to acquire the depth and gravity which make 
its pride. 

But the thoughts of Dante, although they often tended toward 
the consideration of death, were not accompanied by the egotism 
so often hidden under a melancholy exterior. Besides, the great 
breadth of his views did not allow him to ignore the relations 
whereby the eternal destiny of individuals is bound to the temp- 
oral vicissitudes of society. Hence, pious solicitudes bore him 
back to the midst of the political disputes into which he had been 
drawn in earlier years by the passions of his youth. In no direc- 
tion did his ideas develop with more energy and originality. 
Whilst the commentators of Bologna, living in his day, were los- 
ing themselves in a minute interpretation of the text of the laws, 
he soared boldly to the origin, divine as well as human, of all law, 
and thence drew a definition to which nothing need be added. 
Doubtless, he borrowed from the publicists of his own time many 
of the arguments on which he bases the sovereignty of the Holy 
Empire. But the empire as he conceives it, is no longer that of 
Charlemagne, standing with its universal suzerainty at the head 
of the individual royalties, which in turn hold under their allegi- 
ance all the inferior ranks of a feudal aristocracy. His is a new 
conception, closely related to two grand phases of history : on the 


one side, the primitive Roman empire, in which the prince, invest- 


338 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ed with the tribunitial power, represents in his triumph the 
plebeians victorious over the patriciate; and on the other, the 
French monarchy, rising, through its alliance with the communes, 
upon the ruins of the nobility. The depositary of power, even 
under the name of Czesar, his head crowned with the imperial dia- 
dem, is, in the eyes of Dante, the immediate agent of the multi- 
tude, acting as a level equalizing all heads. Among privileges, 
none appears to him more odious than that of birth; he shakes 
feudalism to its very base, and his severe polemics, when attack- 
ing the inheritance of honors, does not spare the inheritance of 
property, limiting it to certain conditions. He had searched the 
loftiest regions of moral theology to find the generative principles 
of a philosophy of society: he thence pitilessly pursued the de- 
ductions drawn, down to the most democratic and most impracti- 
cable maxims. He passed over the entire ground traversed by in- 
quiring minds, from Macchiavelli, the first who attempted to re- 
duce to learned forms the art of government, down to Leibnitz, 
Thomasius, and Wolf, who vivified the abstract ideas of meta- 
physics by transporting them into the realm of law, national 
and civil; and again, from Montesquieu, Bececaria, and the en- 
cyclopedists, down to the bloody revolution which put in praetice 
the ultimate consequences drawn from their teachings. Later 
still, when the disciples of Saint-Simon promised the guerdon to 


each one according to his capacity, and to each capacity according 


In the Thirteenth Century. 339 


to the work accomplished, these bold innovators were merely echo- 
ing views expressed in a moment of bitter discontent by the old 
singer of the Middle Ages. 

Finally, the interests of the nations, always restricted within 
certain limitations of space and time, did not yet offer a suffi- 
ciently broad arena for the employment of his thoughts. Cath- 
olicity, in whose bosom he was born, had taught him to embrace 
in a wide feeling of fraternity men of all times and all places. 
This generous mode of viewing things never left him even amid 
his most learned labors, and his thought, as well as his love, 
took into account the whole of humanity. When in the Convito 
he endeavors to surround the dogma of the immortality of the 
soul with irrefragable proofs, it is to the unanimous convictions 
of the human race that he appeals. When he wishes to refute the 
haughty prejudices of an hereditary aristocracy, he goes back to 
the common eradje of the whole human family. When in the 
treatise, de Monarchia, he desires to propose a perfect form of 
government, he wishes to see it realized over the whole face of 
the earth that the work of civilization may be hastened, a work 
which is none other than the harmonious development of all intel- 
lects and all wills. When he enumerates the conquests of the 
Roman people, he shows them as taking their place in the econ- 
omy of the designs of Providence for the redemption of the 


world. The Divine Comedy is in fact the outline of a universal 


340 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


history. In that vast gallery of death, no great figure is missing: 
Adam and the patriarchs, Achilles and the heroes, Homer and 
the poets, Aristotle and the sages; Alexander, Brutus, and Cato ; 
Peter and the Apostles; the Fathers of the Church and the saints ; 
with the whole succession of those who had worn, with shame 
or with honor, the crown or the tiara, downto John XXTI., Phil- 
ip the Fair, and Henry of Luxemburg. Political and religious 
revolutions are represented under allegories easily translatable in- 
to as many severe judgments. While we thus follow humanity 
through the exterior transformations which it ceaselessly under- 
goes, we also find in it the element of constancy which it con- 
tains: amid diversity, unity is revealed; in the midst of change, 
permanency. In the depths of the infernal zones, on the painful 
ways of Purgatory, amid the glories of Paradise, it is always 
man whom we meet—iost, expiating, or rehabilitated ; and when 
at the close of the poem the last veil is lifted, and we are permit- 
ted to contemplate the Divine Trinity, we perceive in Its depths 
the eternal Word united to human nature. This latter is then 
not only, as the ancients said, a microcosm, an abridgment of the 
universe; it extends throughout the universe, it even passes be- 
yond it and loses itself in the infinite. We may herein find an 
entire philosophy of humanity, which is at the same time a phil- 
osophy of history. It is well known how great is the favor en- 


joyed by this species of study, inaugurated by the Bishop of 


In the Thirteenth Century. 341 


Meaux, enriched by the speculations of Vico, Herder, and Fred- 
eric Schlegel, and destined to harvest the fruit of all the labor 
that an indefatigable erudition is carrying on around us. 

Dante may hence be numbered among the most remarkable 
precursors of modern rationalism, in that he was among the first 
to give to philosophical science a moral, political, and universal 
direction. And yet, he did not fall into the excesses we have 
witnessed in our own day. He did not deify humanity by repre- 
senting it as sufficient to itself, without other light than that of 
its own reason, with no law but that of its own will. Neither 
did he confine it within the vicious circle of its terrestrial destiny, 
as do those for whom all the events of history are in turn merely 
the effects and the necessary causes of other events, past or fu- 
ture. He placed humanity neither so high nor solow. He saw 
that it is not whoily in this world, through which it passes, so to 
speak, in swarms ; he went first of all to seek it at the end of the 
journey, where the numberless pilgrims of life are gathered to- 
gether forever. It has been said that Bossuet, wielding the rod 
of Moses, drives the generations to the grave. We may truly 
say that Dante there awaits them, holding the scales of the last 
judgment. He takes his stand upon the truths that they ought 
to believe, on the justice that they ought to observe, and he 
weighs their deeds with the weights of eternity. He points out 


to them thé places on the right hand or on the left which their 


342 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


virtues or their crimes have prepared for them; at the sound of 
his voice, the multitude divides, and passes on through the gates 
of Hell or up the pathways that lead to Heaven. Thus, with the 
remembrance of our eternal destinies, morality re-enters into his- 
tory ; humanity, humiliated under the law of death, is lifted up 
through the law of duty; and if we must deny it the honors of a 
prond apotheosis, we yet save it from the ignominy ofa brutish 
fatalism. 

4. Thus, the logical and practical tendencies of the philosopher- 
poet chime in with those of our own time, without partaking 
of their errors. There is within us a self-love which makes us 
gladly welcome a resemblance to ourselves, and which also makes 
us regard the superiority of others to ourselves as a consolation, 
because such superiority leads us not to despair of the nature 
with which we areendowed. Thence flow the universal admira- 
tion and sympathy which in these later days have called from 
oblivion the great man whose work we have been considering. 
“Dante,” says M. de Lamartine, “seems to be the poet of our 
era, for each epoch adopts and rejuvenates some one of the im- 
mortal geniuses who are always as well men of their time; it 
meets its own reflection in his being, in him is traced an image of 


itself, and thus does it betray its nature by its predilections”! 





1 Discourse on the occasion of his reception into the French Academy. 


CHAPTER V. 
THE ORTHODOXY OF DANTE. 


k | AVING successively reviewed the principal periods in the 


history of philosophy, in order to find among the vari- 


ous systems produced, terms of comparison with the doctrines 
held by Dante, we must now consider these doctrines from a 
higher point of view, one independent and unchangeable, that of 
the Faith. Does Dante by his convictions belong to Catholic 
orthodoxy? This problem has during the past three centuries 
given rise to serious discussions. 

1. Protestantism, at its birth) felt the need of creating for it- 
self a genealogy which might carry it back to apostolic times, 
and thus vindicate in its behalf the accomplishment of the prom- 
ise of infallibility made by the Redeemer to His Church. Hence 
it went about, upturning the stones of every ruin and every tomb, 
questioning the dead and the institutions of the past, making for 
itself a family out of the heresies of all times, seeking out the 
freest and boldest among the geniuses of the Middle Ages, and 
claiming them as fathers. Naturally, it was by no means scru- 
pulous in the selection of proofs: for it, afew bitter words on the 


subject of contemporaneous abuses, falling from the pen of some 
345 


344 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


celebrated man, sufficed for his immediate admission into the 
catalogue of supposed witnesses to the truth.’ Dante certainly 
could not expect to escape these posthumous honors. His vehe- 
ment satire had more than once been employed against the ways 
of clerics and the policy of the sovereign pontiffs. Sundry pas- 
sages in his poem, ingeniously contorted, seemed, it was said, to 
contain derisive allusions to the most sacred mysteries of the 
Catholic liturgy.? But especially was the last canto of the Purga- 
torio quoted, wherein is found a prediction of an envoy sent by 
Heaven to chastise the courtezan seated on the beast with seven 
heads and ten horns: he is designated by characters forming the 
Latin word DVX, which may well indicate one of the Ghibelline 
captains of Lombardy or Tuscany. This envoy was said to be 
none other than Luther; for the ciphers gave the number five 
hundred and fifteen, which, if a thousand years were added on 


one side and two years on the other, would produce the date 1517, 





1 Francowitz (Flaccus Illyricus) : Catalogus testium veritatis. 
2 Purgatorio, xxxiii., 12. 
**God’s vengeance fears no sop.” 

The stupidity or the malice of some commentators has presumed this 
line to be a gross blasphemy against the most holy Sacrifice of the Mass. 
We now know that the line refers to the custom, then prevalent in Florence, 
of placing bread and wine on the grave of those whose death one had 
caused; the idea was that the vengeance of the relations might thus be 


averted. The custom was of pagan origin. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 345 


the hegira of the '‘‘ Reformers.” ! Such were the main arguments 
of those who, from the sixteenth century onward, strove to popu- 
larize the new opinions under the shelter of a venerated name.? 
Italian patriotism responded nobly through its organ, Cardinal 
Bellarmine; that famous controversial writer, who in his day 
bore the brunt of all quarrels touching religion, who had the 
papacy for a client and kings (as James I.) for adversaries, did 
not disdain to employ his pen in defence of the national poet.$ 
The same questions were agitated in France, no doubt less 
brilliantly, but with no less erudition, between Duplessis-Mornay 
and Coeffeteau ; 4 it was perhaps through an imperfect acquaintance 


with this discussion that Father Hardouin pronounced the curious 





1 Purgatorio, xxxiii., 14. C. 
Plainly I view, and therefore speak, the stars 
E’en now approaching, whose conjunction, free 
From all impediment and bar, brings on 
A season, in the which, one sent from God 
(Five hundred, tive, and ten, do mark him out) 
That foul one, and the accomplice of her guilt, 
The giant, both, shall slay. 
2 Ayviso piacevole dato alla Bella Italia da un nobile giovine francese. 
3 Bellarmine, Appendix ad Libros de Summo Ponteyice ; Responsio 
ad Librum quemdam anonymum. 
4 Duplessis-Mornay, le mystere @iniquite, p. 419.—Coefteleau, Réponse 


au livre intitulé le mystére, ete., p. 1032. 


346 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


judgment that the Divine Comedy was the work of a disciple of 
Wycliffe. Ata later date, when Italian literature, freed from the 
fatal influence of the seicentisti, fell back upon better traditions, 
the veneration for the older poets of the land was skilfully em- 
ployed by the secret societies and associated with their political 
and religious theories. And finally, in our own days, when 
the leaders of a party vanquished, but deserving of respectful 
commiseration, sought an asylum in England, the need of whiling 
away the sad leisure of exile, perhaps also the desire of making 
some return for Protestant hospitality received, inspired the new 
system of interpretation proposed by Ugo Foscolo and supported 
by G. Rossetti, not without a vast display of learning and imagi- 
nation.! It must be remembered that when the heresy of the 
Albigenses was suppressed, its remains dispersed throughout 
Christendom gave rise to numerous sects, whose adherents, under 
the name of Pastoureaux, Flagellants, Fratricelli, prepared the 
way for the Wycliffites and the Hussites, themselves the pre- 
cursors of Luther, Henry VIII., and Calvin. More prudent than 
these divers seets, but animated by the same anti-papal spirit, a 
mysterious association is supposed to haye been formed, to which 
Dante, Petrarch, and Boceaccio devoted their sworn allegiance 


and the service of their genius. Their writings, from that date, 








1 La Commedia di Dante Alighieri, illustrata da Ugo Foscolo.—Ros- 
setti, Sullo spirito anti-papale che produsse la Réforma. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 347 


are presumed to cover an enigmatic sense to which the key has 
been lost: the celebrated women sung by them, Beatrice, Laura, 
Fiammetta, become so many figures of the civil and religious lib- 
erty whose reign they desired to establish; the Divine Comedy, 
the Rime, and the Decameron were to be at once the New Testa- 
ment and the constitutional charter destined to change the face 
of Kurope. More especially is Dante supposed to have constitut- 
ed himself the chief of this apostolate—that particular mission 
having been bestowed upon him in one of his visions, wherein he 
represents himself as questioned, approved of, and blessed by the 
three privileged disciples of Christ,—Peter, James, and John. 
Thus has the poor exile failed to find, even in his grave, the 
repose which there at least awaits the remainder of mankind. 
He has been dragged from it to be cast (still robed in his shroud, 
like a phantom intended to excite terror in vulgar minds) into the 
arena of contending factions. Happily, pious hands have been 
stretched forth to save him from such profanation. In Italy, 
Foscolo encountered learned controvertists; ! and the oracle of 
German criticism, A. W. Schlegel, by condemning Rossetti’s chi- 


merical interpretations, has effectually set aside the brand of dis- 








1 Preface of the Milanese editors to the PaGuar edition of Dante’s Con. 
vito. See also Cesare Balbo, Vita di Dante; Fao. Zinelii, intare.o atv 


spirito religioso di Dante. 


348 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


honesty which they would, if true, have imprinted on the brows 
of three great men. ! 

2. Now, if we may be permitted to offer our opinion in corrob- 
oration of such grave authorities, we shall do somerely by sum- 
marily adducing the texts which seem to us decisive; we shall 
let the accused speak for himself, confiding his apology to his 
own words. 

To begin with, we find him distinctly separating himself from 
modern naturalism, when he proclaims revelation to be the final 
criterion of logical truth and the moral law; when he formulates 
his opinion that the noblest function of philosophy is to lead by 
means of the marvels which it explains, to the unexplainable 
miracles on which the faith is stayed; when, finally, he gives all 
glory to that faith descended from on high, through which alone 
one can merit to philosophize for eternity in the bosom of the 
celestial Athens, where the wise men of all schools meetin the 
contemplation of the infinite intelligence.? Severe toward her- 
esy and schism, he prepares for them the most frightful tor- 
ments known to his Hell. Neither political sympathies nor civil 


and military virtues avail to soften him in this regard; he im- 





1 Letter by A. W. Schlegel on G. Rossetti’s work, revue des Deux Mon- 
des, Aug. 15th, 1836. Rossetti’s interpretations have been learnedly re- 
futed by Father Pianciani. in the Annali delle scienze religiose. 


2 Convito, iii., 7, 11; iv.,15. De Monarchia, iii. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 349 


prisons in burning sepulchres, Frederie II. and Cardinal Ubaldini, 
idols of the imperial party, as well as Farinata and Cavalcante, 
two of the most eminent citizens of Florence: he does more, and, 
as if to refute in advance the calumniators of his memory, he 
prophesies the miserable end, and pronounces the eternal damna- 
tion of the monk Dolcino, the principal leader of the very Fratri- 
celli in whose errors he is presumed to have been a participant. 
If the poet, really endowed with the second sight which he 
sometimes feigned, had, in place of this obscure monk, perceived 
the Wittenberg professor casting into the flames the bull setting 
forth his condemnation, he would certainly have marked out for 
him his place among the sowers of schism and of scandal, and 
we should read with a shudder of admiring horror the episode 
of Luther, no whit inferior to that of Ugolino.! 

If these general indications are not enough, and an express 
profession of faith upon each of the contested points is considered 
necessary, this requirement can readily be met. Peter of Bruys, 
Waldo, Dolcino, and the other innovators of the same period had 
attacked the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the forms of the sacraments, 


the honor shown to the cross, and prayers for the dead.? Dante 





1 Inferno, ix., and xxviii., passim. 

2 See Peter the Venerable, contra Petrobusios.—Bossuet, Hist. des 
variations, liv. xi.—Raynaldus, the continuer of Baronius, Annales eccles. 
1100-1200. Reinerii, Contra valdenses hoereticos, liber in Biblioteca 
Patrum maxima. Muratori, Antiquitates, dissert. 40, de Hceresibus. 


350 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


renders homage to the Church, the spouse and mouthpiece of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, incapable of falsehood and of error. He 
‘places tradition alongside of the Holy Scriptures, and assigns to 
both a like power over consciences; * he recognizes the power of 
the keys, the force of excommunication, and the value of vows.® 
He describes the economy of penance with especial predilection ; 
he doubts neither of the legitimacy of indulgences nor of the 
merit of works of satisfaction.4 He has himself justified the ven- 
eration paid to images; he is never weary of recommending the 
suffering souls to the suffrages of the living; his confidence in 
the intercession of the saints is redoubled when he addresses 
himself to the Blessed Virgin Mary.® Finally, the religious 
orders, even the institution of the Holy Office, find favor in his 
sight, and St. Dominic is lauded in his poem as “ the jealous lov- 
er of the Christian faith, filled with mildness toward its disciples, 
but formidable to its foes.” ® 


When thus placing himself under the patronage of the holy 








1 Convito, ii., 4, 6. 

2 Paradiso v., 25. 

5 Purgatorio, ix., 26; iii., 46; Paradiso, y., 19. 

* Purgatorio, ix., passim; ii., 83.—Paradiso, xxv., 23; XXVii., 37. 
® Paradiso, iy., 14.—Purgatorio, passim.—Paradiso, xxxiii., 1. 


® Paradiso, xi. and xii., passim, 


In the Thirteenth Century. 351 


doctor who, under the title of Master of the Sacred Palace, was 
the first person officially charged with the ministration of the 
censorship, could the poet possibly have imagined that we, a 
far-off posterity, very slightly versed in theology, would one day 
venture to discuss the accuracy and sincerity of his beliefs ? 

But one reproach made against him still subsists, and that is, 
the persistency with which his invectives pursue the Roman court 
and the sovereign pontiffs, heaping plenteous blame on the heads 
of those whose feet he should have kissed. To this we may re- 
ply, first, by making a distinction between the office of the sover- 
eign pontiff, indefectible and divine in its origin, and the person, 
consecrated, but mortal and open to temptation, who is invested 
with that office. Catholics have never been required to believe 
in the impeceability of their pastors. The most ardent defenders 
of the rights of the priesthood, as St. Bernard and St. Thomas of 
Canterbury, never concealed the vices which sometimes dis- 
honored the sacred profession. The Church invested with an in- 
violability far graver than that surrounding kings, cannot be held 
responsible for the iniquities of sundry among her ministers. 
Doubtless it is more pious to turn aside our gaze, and, like the 
sons of the patriarch, throw a mantle over the turpitude of those 
who are our fathers in the faith. But if Dante forgot this, if, in 
the evil days he passed far from his native city, he accused the 


chiefs of the party that kept its gates closed against him; if, in 


352 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the ardor of an indignation which he deemed virtuous, he often 
repeated calumnies founded upon hearsay; if he failed to appre- 
ciate the piety of St. Celestine, the impetous zeal of Boniface VIIT., 
the learning of John XXII., we may indeed characterize such ac- 
tion as imprudence and the result of anger, as a mistake and a 
fault, but not as heresy. And besides, we must pardon much to 
genius, because, like every other greatness on this earth, it is as- 
sailed by stronger temptations, and exposed to more numerous 
perils than fall to the ordinary lot of men. However, it should 
here be remembered that Dante, the contemporary of fourteen 
popes, has lauded two of them, said nothing about seven, and, in 
the five remaining, has undertaken to blame only the imperfections 
of humanity: he never ceased to venerate the sacredness of the 
office.1 When he purposes immolating Boniface VIII. to his po- 
etic vengeance, he begins by despoiling him of the august charac- 
ter which he is fearful of profaning; and, with a temerity not 
devoid of some remnant of respect, he declares on his own au- 
thority the vacancy of the Iloly See.? Then all at onee, when 
this same pope appears to him girt about with the added majesty 
of misfortune, a captive amid the emissaries of Philip the Fair, 


he no longer sees in him aught but the vicar and image of Christ 


1 Adrian V. in Purgatory ; John XXI. in Paradise. See for the others: 
Inferno, xix., 34; Purgatorio, xix., 43. 
2 Purgatorio, xxxiii., 12. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 353 


crucified anew.! He always bows before the Papacy as before a 
sacred magistracy, a power which Peter received from Heaven 
and transmitted to his successors; he in fact makes it the primor- 
dial object of the designs of Providence in regard to Rome, the 
secret of the grand destinies of the Roman empire, the bond unit- 
ing antiquity with later times.? He insists on the necessity for 
the religious monarchy, which he contrasts with the temporal 
monarchy ; and, although he calls for a reciprocal independence 
between the sacerdotal power and that of the empire, he requires 
that in the spiritual order the heir of the Czsars should profess 
a filial deference toward the successors of the Apostles.’ Tf this 
language be pleasing to our “ reformed” brethren, and can decide 
them to reckon the poet as one of themselves, let them speak in 
a like manner, and at this rallying word the south and the north 
will exchange salutations ; the doctors from London and Berlin 
will meet at the gates of Rome; the Vatican will enlarge its por- 


ticoes for the accommodation of the reconciled generations; and, 





1 Purgatorio, xx., 2 Paradiso, xxx., 48; xxiv., 12. Inferno, ii., 8. 

3 De Monarchia, iii. The book, de Monarchia, was placed on the in- 
dex, as favoring the excessive pretensions of the temporal power. But 
this condemnation was never extended to the Divine Comedy. One great 
pope held him who failed to admire the beauties of this poem as possessed 
of an uncultured mind. See the anecdote as told by Arrivabene Amori 


di Dante. 


354 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


in the joy occasioned by a universal alliance, will be realized the 
prophecy inscribed on the obelisk of St. Peter’s: Curistus VIN 
vIT, CHRISTUS REGNAT, CHRISTUS IMPERAT. 

3. Our task is accomplished. The orthodoxy of Dante, sufficient- 
ly established by the proofs that have been adduced, seems to us 
still more plainly evidenced from the entire course of the work 
undertaken by us and now drawing toa close. We find it to be 
a dominant truth, the resultant of all our researches and indue- 
tions. When studying the circumstances environing the poet, we 
found that he was born, so to speak, on the latest verge of the 
heroic days of the Middle Ages when Catholic philosophy had 
reached its apogee, and in a country illumined by its purest rays. 
Amid these salutary influences, and through the vicissitudes of a 
life filled with misfortunes, with moral emotions and profound 
studies, the whole concourse of which must have tended to de- 
velop within him the religious seutiment, we have beheld him 
conceive a magnificent work, the plan of which, borrowed from 
the methods of legendary poetry, was intended to embrace both 
the most sublime mysteries of faith and the loftiest conceptions 
of science. A scrupulous analysis hay taught. us to know that 
collection of doctrines, which, under the three categories of Evil, 
of Good and Evil in conflict, and finally of Good, comprises the 
individual man, society, the future life, the external world, the 


world of spirits, God Himself. If im many ways Dante holds re- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 355 


lations with the systems of the East, with Greek idealism and 
Greek sensism, even with the empiricism and rationalism of mod- 
ern times, he belongs above all to the two great schools, the mys- 
tic and the dogmatic, of the thirteenth century, of which he do- 
cilely accepts not only the essential dogmas, but also the accessory 
ideas, often even the favorite expressions. It has been said that 
Homer was the theologian of pagan antiquity, and Dante, in his 
turn, has been represented as the Homer of Christian times. This 
comparison, while honoring his genius, wrongs his religion. The 
blind poet of Smyrna was justly accused of having brought the 
gods down too near to the level of man; on the contrary, no one 
has known better than the Florentine to lift man up and cause 
him to ascend toward the Divinity. It is through this quality, 
through the purity and the immaterial character of his symbol- 
ism, as also through the limitless breadth of his conception, that 
he has left far beneath him poets ancient and recent, more espe- 


cially, Milton and Klopstock.! If, then, we desire to make one of 





1 See, for example, the gateway of Hell as portrayed by Dante and by 
Milton. The singer of the Paradise Lost exhausts himself in gigantic im- 
ages. Forming his gates of nine layers of metal and of adamant, he adds a 
palisade of fire; he seats before them two formidable monsters, Death 
and Sin, and only succeeds in astonishing his readers. 

Hell bounds high reaching to the horrid roof, 
And thrice threefold the gates ; three folds were’ brass, 


350 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


those comparisons which fix in the memory two names so associ- 
ated together that they recall and explain one another, we may 
say, and such expression would contain an epitome of this work, 


that the Divine Comedy is the literary and philosophic Summa 





Three iron, three of adamantine rock 
Impenetrable, impaled with circling fire, 
Yet unconsumed. Before the gates there sat 
On either side a formidable shape, ete. ; 
Dante, on the contrary, here describes nothing. He needs neither iron 
nor fire ; he is content with an inscription nine lines long, but he leaves 
us dismayed. Inferno, iii., 1. : 
Per me si va nella citta dolente, 
Per me si Va nell’ eterno dolore, 
Per me si va tra la perduta gente. 
Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore : 
Fecemi la divina potestate, 
La somma sapienza e il primo amore. 
Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, 
Se non eterne, ed io eterno duro: 
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate. 
Cary’s Trans. : 
Through me you pass into the city of woe: 
Through me you pass into eternal pain: 
Through me among the people lost for aye. 
Justice the founder of my fabric moved: 
To rear me was the task of Power divine, 
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love. 
Before me things create were none, save things 
Eternal, and eternal I endure. 
All hope abandon, ye who enter here. 


In the Thirteenth Century. LLY, 


of the Middle Ages, and that Dante is the St. Thomas of poetry.' 

Thus do we find ourselves brought back to our point of depart- 
ure—to the admirable fresco in the Vatican, in which Dante is 
placed among the doctors, and to the solemn and popular honors 
which Italy has paid to his memory: we now know the reason 
of the fame awarded to him. It is that the knowledge he pos- 
sessed of his own prodigious endowments never made him forget 
the fatal flaw common to human nature, condemned to suffer and 
to remain in ignorance of many things to the very end, and con- 
sequently obliged to believe and to serve. Far above others as 


he might stand, he never deemed that the distance separating 





1 The ** Universal Journal of Literature’ of Halle (Allgemeine Litera- 
tur-Zeitung), in which this book and its author are treated with a truly 
flattering attention aud kindness, nevertheless attacks this chapter upon 
the orthodoxy of Dante. The critic complains that no heed has been paid 
to the traces of heterodoxy found in the poem. I regret that he did not 
point these out, and that he has presented no new objections, which I 
would have carefully considered. Thus far, I can shelter myself behind 
two great authorities. I haye on my side Catholic criticism, which has 
never found heresy in the Divine Comedy, and which has reprinted it, 
commented upon it, praised it, lauding it to the skies, eyenin Rome, with 
all the required approbaticns, and without fear of the rigors of the Index. 
I also ground myself upon modern Protestant criticism, of Which the most 
competent spokesman, A. W. Schlegel, bas so emphatically condemned 


the paradox of Foscolo and Rossetti. 


358 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


mortals from heaven was lessened in his case; he entertained 
for them too much respect and love to seek to impose upon them 
the tyranny of his personal opinions, to wish to detach them from 
that which they held most dear, their beliefs: he remained within 
the communion of the eternal ideas wherein are found the lifeand 
the salvation of the human race; he so acted that the humblest 
of his contemporaries and the remotest of their descendants might 
call him their brother and rejoice in his triumphs. More than 
five hundred years have passed since the old Alighieri ‘‘ went to 
sleep” at Ravenna, where his body still rests under the sepul- 
chral marble. Since that day, twenty generations of ‘ speaking 
men,” to use the energetic expression of the Greeks, have fol- 
lowed one another; and the words which have fallen from their 
lips, even more than the dust raised by their footsteps, have 
changed the face of the earth. The Holy Roman Empire no 
longer exists. The disputes which agitated the Italian republics 
have vanished with the republics themselves. The palace of the 
Priors of Florence is deserted; and on the opposite bank of the 
Arno, a foreign dynasty, naturalized by benefits conferred, peace- 
ably wields the grand-ducal sceptre of Tuscany.! The resting- 


place of the ashes of Beatrice is unknown; the very name per- 





1 (This was written before the recent changes in the government of Italy. 


—TRANS.) 


In the Thirteenth Century. 359 


taining to her family would be lost, had it not been inscribed 
among the founders of an obscure hospital. The chairs are silent 
whence issued the dissertations of the scholastic masters. Navi- 
gators have explored the distant seas onee closed to men through 
superstitious dread; and seamen have found on their confines, 
instead of the mountain of Purgatory and its immortal inhabitants, 
lands and peoples similar to our own. The telescope has been 
directed to the heavens, and the nine spheres presumed to move 
in harmony round our earth have vanished into nothingness. 
Thus have passed away the various species of interest, political, 
elegiac, and scientific, wherein the poem of Dante was indebted 
to the passing things of this nether world; outside of its beau- 
tiful poetic form, it would retain no other merit than that of an 
historical document difficult to comprehend were it not that it 
had borrowed from another class of topics a universal attraction. 

The mysteries of death, which of yore gave men whereon to 
speculate, have not ceased to employ our thoughts, and no light 
other than that afforded by the Catholic faith has come to illumine 
them for us. As Dante guided the ardent imaginations of our 
fathers, he still leads our adult and disputatious intelligences; 
he occupies a place above all the developments of the human fac- 
ulties, immutable amid the ruins of the older science and the cont 
structions of the new: he has no need to fear the Christopher 


Columbuses and the Koperniks that are still to come; for, as 


360 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


those two great men, by discovering the true form and the real 
relations of our globe settled once for all the wavering opinions 
held upon those two principal points in the system of the physical 
world, and left to the navigators and astronomers of the future 
only discoveries as to the details; so the Catholic faith, by mak- 
ing known man and his relations to God, has revealed for all 
time the system of the moral world: a new earth and new heavens 
are no longer discoverable, only individual truths and subordinate 
laws: too little to satisfy pride, but enough to occupy to the end 


of ages the laborious assiduity of the human mind, 


PACE daw < 





INQUIRIES AND DOCUMENTS IN AID OF THE HISTORY 
OF DANTE AND OF CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY. 





I.—Dante’s Political Life. 
Was he a Guelf or a Ghibelline ? 


WW have seen how the Florentine poet took part in the 
civil discords agitating his country ; we readily under- 
stand that historians have been tempted to range him on the 
side of one or other of the two factions which divided Italy dur- 
ing the Middle Ages: general opinion has placed him among 
the Ghibellines.' However, as by his family and his first associ- 
ations he seemed to belong to the Guelfs, some critics have. distin- 
guished in his political life two periods, devoted to the defence 
of two opposing causes, and separated from one another by the 
fatal day of his exile.2 Without wishing to undervalue the au- 
thority of the critiés and of general opinion, we cannot. refrain 
from entertaining and expressing some doubts on this subject: 


we fear that the question has been confused by the uncertainty 


1 ¥. Schlegel (History of Literature, vol. II.) reproaches Dante with “' the 
harsh impress of the Ghibelline spirit found throughout his poem.” 
2 See especially the learned pamphlet of Count Troja: Del Veltro alle- 


gorico di Dante. 
361 


362 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


of meaning in the terms used; we shall begin by examining the 
different significations successively pertaining to the rival names 
of Guelf and Ghibelline, and then we shall inquire by what title 


the one or the other could justly be applied to Dante. 
il 


1. The name of the Guelfs dates from a remote period; we find 
it even during the time of the great barbarian invasions. Among 
the companions of Attila, historians speak of a German chieftain 
named Eticho, to whom they give two sons, an elder, Odoacer, 
and a younger, Welf. We find that the descendants of Welf es- 
tablished themselves in the county of Altdorf in Suabia,! in the 
duchies of Alsace and Zaehringen, and in the marquisate of Tus- 
cany. Adelbert I., marquis of Tuscany (850), was the head of a 
branch which, later on acquiring the marquisate of Este, became 
sufficiently powerful to give, in 1071, dukes to Bavaria. About 
the same time (1080) the duchy of Suabia was conferred upon 
the counts of Hohenstaufen, originally from the castle of Weib- 
ling in Wurtemberg. The attainment of the imperial dignity by 
Conrad of Suabia, and the rebellion of Henry the Proud (1138), 
gave rise toa bloody quarrel between the two families, which 
quarrel, suspended for a while, was renewed more fiercely than 


ever under Frederic Barbarossa and Henry the Lion (1180), and 





} Memoir on the origin of the house of Brunswick. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 363 


finally divided Germany between Philip, duke of Suabia, and 
Otho IV., the two competitors for the imperial crown. Welf and 
Weibling were the war-cries calling together the armies of the 
two inimical houses: it is said they were first heard at the bat- 
tle of Weinsberg (1140); soon they were repeated from the 
shores of the Baltic to the banks of the Danube, but, stayed by 
the Alps, they were some time in reaching the Italian Peninsula. 

2. Italy had long served as the arena of still more serious 
struggles, those existing between the Church and the Empire. 
The Papacy, the more surely to exercise its sanctifying and civ- 
ilizing action upon the Christian world, then disturbed by so many 
barbarian instincts, needed to occupy an independent and central 
position: thence, for it, the necessity of a temporal domain. Nor 
were legal titles lacking. Since the time when the people of 
Rome placed themselves under the patronage of Gregory II., the 
donation of the Exarchate and the Pentapolis (751), the homage 
rendered by Robert Guiscard for the duchy of Apulia (1059), and 
the legacy of the Countess Matilda (1102) had strengthened the 
apostolic power. It had also in its favor the heroic virtues of 
many Pontiffs, the mildness and wisdom of the ecclesiastical laws, 
and the natural inclination of the human conscience to receive in 
the civil order an authority already acknowledged in matters 
of religion. It possessed, in fine, all that could create a right, 


even where such right did not already exist,—the respect, love, 


364 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


and admiration of the people. On the other hand, the emper- 
ors were saluted as kings of the Romans; they wore the iron 
crowns of Lombardy; they had, unopposed, distributed fiefs in 
Italy ; and the decrees of the diet of Roncaglia (1158) ascribed to 
them the plenitude of regal rights. They likewise alleged the 
supposed act by which Otho the Great (963) was said to have 
obtained for himself and his successors the privilege of interven- 
ing in the election of the popes. Neither did they, disdain the 
support of traditions and theories. While they showed 'them- 
selves to be the guardians and the heads of the feudal. system, 
they also claimed to be the continuators of the old Roman empire’ 
the laws of which, restored to honor by the jurisconsults of Bo- 
logna, were pleaded by them: The German Cesar, the heir of 
Charlemagne, and the successor to Augustus (semper Augustus), 
considered himself under this title to be the sole master of the 


world.! 





1 We find a curious monument of the pretensions made by the imperial 
monarchy, in the Constitution of Henry VII., inserted in the Corpis juris 
civilis, which begins as follows: ‘‘ In order to repress the crimes of many 
persons, who break the bonds of that entire fidelity which they owe, and 
take up arms with hostile intent against the Roman Empire, on the 
peace of which the order of the whole world reposes ; to say nothing of 
the precepts, not only human, but divine, which command that every hu- 


man soul shall be subject to the Prince of the Romans,” ete. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 305 


The question of investitures set‘in opposition these two sover- 
eign powers of Christendom, in the persons of Henry IV. and 
Gregory VII. The Pontiff, attacked by a force of arms, found an 
unexpected ally in Welf I., duke of Bavaria (1077). Welf IT. 
married the Countess Matilda, the: benefactress of the Church. 
When Frederic Barbarossa crossed the Alps for the third time, 
threatening to crush with a single blow Alexander III. and the 
Lombard League formed under his auspices, the defection of Hen- 
ry the Lion at the battle of Lignano (1176) saved them from cer- 
tain defeat: The son of this prince, Otho IV., was sustained in his 
pretensions to. the imperial throne by ‘Innocent III. Meantime, 
the marquises of Este continued by their fidelity to render the an- 
cient name of Welf loved and respected by the papal party. On 
the other hand, never did the imperial domination seem more se- 
curely established-in Italy than under the reign of the Hohen- 
staufen, especially after the marriage of Henry IV. to Constance 
(1190) had added the crown of Sicily to the possessions of their 
house. | The. banners of the Weiblingen then rallied round them 
all the enemies of the Holy See. 

Thus became popularized the names of Welf and Weibling, mod- 
ified, aecording to the usage of the Italian tongue, into Guelf and 
Ghibelline. From that period, applied respectively to the defend- 
ers of the priesthood or of the empire, they kept their new signi- 


fication.down to the time'when Fréderie II., at the height’ of. his 


306 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


victorious career, was stricken by the censures of the Council of 
Lyons (1245). The tyrant, overcome in his turn, and pursued by 
an avenging fatality, died, smothered by the hand of one of his 
own bastards (1250). The triumph of the sacerdotal party sus- 
pended the struggle for many years. 

3. But we have already seen the monarchy of the Holy Em- 
pire represented as the necessary crowning-point of the feudal 
system whose broad base covered the half of Europe. Now, feu- 
dalism, founded on the south side of the Alps by the Lombards 
(who divided their possessions into thirty-six duchies), and 
strengthened by concessions of fiefs, of which the emperors were 
by no means niggardly, was perpetuated by the Constitution of 
Jonrad the Salic, who established in perpetuity the hereditability 
of military fiefs. 

Still, these institutions introduced by northern populations 
could not meet with unreserved devotion among Italians, who 
preserved the memory and the remains of the municipal or- 
ganization introduced, in the days of the Roman rule, into 
all the cities of the Peninsula. Following the example of the 
maritime cities, enfranchised at an early period, the towns of 
Lombardy, Romagna, and Tuseany demanded liberties which their 
rulers sold to them for gold. They found a more disinterested 
protection on the part of the sovereign pontiff : they confederated 


into powerful leagues, of. which the Holy See was the central 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. - 367 


point—leagues which more than once protected the national ter- 
ritory against German invasion. The peace of Constance (1183) 
the result of their courageous efforts, secured to them the right 
of enclosure, of laying taxes, of choosing magistrates, of making 
war or peace, and thus raised them to the rank of independent 
powers. From that time, the nobles were to be found engaged 
in the service of monarchy; they fought under the banners of 
the Ghibellines : whereas the people were, by their interests, influ- 
enced in favor of the papacy; they contributed to the success 
of the Guelfs. When the main struggle between the two powers, 
the spiritual and the temporal, was ended, the aristocracy and the 
democracy remained armed, and felt desirous of trying their 
strength against each other: they retained their standards and 
their watchwords. The Guelfs became the party of communal 


franchises, and the Ghibellines that of feudal privileges.' These 





1 Wecan see from the admirable discourse addressed by Pope Gregory X. 
to the Florentines, what, as early as 1273, was the confusion of parties and 
the uncertainty pertaining to their names: *‘ He is a Ghibelline; but yet 
he is a Christian, a citizen, a neighbor. So, then, so many and such valid 
names of union shall succumb to the name Ghibelline? ... and this single 
and moreover empty name (for what it signifies nobody knows) shall 
ayail more toward hatred than all those sound, honorable names avail 
toward love?... But since you assert you have taken up these party 
efforts on behalf of the Roman Pontiffs and against their enemies ; I, the. 
Roman Pontiff, although up to the present time these citizens of yours 
may have offended, nevertheless, on their return, have taken them to my 
bosom, and, their misdeeds being pardoned, I bold them as sons.” 


368 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


new discords filled the latter half of the thirteenth century and- 
were continued far down into the fourteenth. Democracy at 

first held fast to its acquisitions, but ere long began to imperil 

them by its own excesses. In the cities of Bologna, Brescia, 

Padua, and Florence, the nobles were declared incapable of hold- 

ing political offices (1285-1295). Banished from public life, they 

shut themselves up in the menacing solitude of their palaces ; 

they there determined upon the ruin of that jealous liberty in 

which they were allowed no share. Favored by the intestine dis- 

sensiuns which they were careful to foment, they found no diffi- 

culty in again seizing upon the reins of power; as early as the 

year 1300, the republics began to see hereditary seigniories ris- 

ing up within their walls. But the seigniors, of whom the greater 
number were first introduced under the titles of podestas, gonfal- 

oniers, captains of the people, retained somewhat of the munici- 

pal magistracies which had thus been borrowed to veil their des- 

potic ambition. Beneath them, they maintained that equality 
which consoles populations under servitude. Above them, they 
acknowledged no sovereign authority. There then remained no 
vestige of the hierarchic order which gives to the feudal system 

its characteristic form; the aristocracy were thus enabled to rule, 

only on condition of making a compromise modifying the usages 
of feudalism. 


4. Down to this point in the contest, we have followed the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 369 


principles around which the warring passions of the time would 
naturally group themselves. It is easy to see that the passions, 
after having made proof of prowess in support of one or another 
principle, would sooner or later come to blows on their own ac- 
count. Underneath the general interests of the aristocracy and 
the democracy were working the especial interests again divid- 
ing cities, villages, and families. Venice rose up against Genoa, 
Florence against Pisa, Pistoja against Arezzo: at Verona there 
were the Montecchi and the Capelletti; the Gieremiei and the 
Lambertazzi at Bologna; the Torriani and the Visconti at Milan ; 
at Rome, the Orsini and the Colonnas: thus there were private 
wars, in other words, brigandage, the arming of all against all, 
the return to social chaos. In this state of things, intervention 
from without could hardly be a greater evil: it might even ap- 
pear as a benefit. At that period, three great nations stood ready 
to intervene in the affairs of Italy. The Germans added to their 
close proximity the habit they had acquired of being received 
with their emperors as masters. The French were notfar away ; 
they had in their favor the popularity conceded to their language 
and their character, also the memory, still recent, of St. Louis. 
Finally, the Aragonese, whose domain extended from the gates 
of Valencia to those of Marseilles, naturally coveted the empire 
of the Mediterranean, and consequently of its shores. The usur- 


pation of the kingdom of Sicily by Manfred, the natural son of 


370 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Frederic I., obliged Pope Urban IV. to exercise his right of suz- 
erainty over the crown of that country: he called upon Charles 
of Anjou to take possession of it. As a captain of the Church of 
Rome, and the vanquisher of Manfred and Conradin (the last of 
the Weiblingen), the Angevine prince seemed to continue the 
work of the older Guelfs. The use of the name was extended to 
include all who were friendly to France, and it continued to be 
thus applied even after the sacrilegious outrage at Anagni. But 
Conradin found an heir in Peter of Aragon, who meantime had 
founded a Spanish dynasty on the other side of the pharos of 
Messina (1282). Thirty years later, Henry VII. (of Luxemburg) 
led the German eagles back into Lombardy and Tuscany (1311). 
All who followed the fortunes of the new leader, all whom hatred 
to the French united together, acknowledged the appellation of 
Ghibelline as pertaining to them: they kept it, even when their 
ranks had been swelled by the multitude of the oppressed who 
groaned under the tyranny of the great lords, and who dreamed 
of the restoration of republican institutions. 

Thus, during the course of a hundred years, the two magic 
words, Guelf and Ghibelline, had passed through no less than 
four distinct significations. Italy had borrowed them from the 
internal dissensions of Germany. They then became attached 
respectively, to the defenders of the priesthood and of the em- 


pire; they were later on reduced to playing an humbler role in 


In the Thirteenth Century. 371 


the struggle of the communes against the feudal system; and fin- 
ally again descended to become the designations of the imprud- 
ent allies of foreign domination. Unhappily for the Peninsula. 


this latter acceptation was the most Jasting. Nothing can give a 


better idea of the disorder and terror attached to these names 
than can the fables by which the Italians accounted for their ori- 
gin. They were said to have arisen from two demons, adored, 
each in its own temple, on separate heights in Sicily, whose vot 
aries had declared implacable war against one another ; they were 
two women who had been seen battling amid the clouds on the 
day of Manfred’s birth; or, according to an opinion popular in 
Florence, they were the names of two dogs fighting in the public 
square, whose quarrel had been taken up by two bands of chil- 
dren, whence it had spread to the families of the children, to the 


whole city, to all Italy, to the entire world.! 





1 Giacobo Malyagio, Saba Malaspina, Villani. In this brief summary 
of the history of Italy during the thirteenth century, we have followed, as 
guides, Dante himself, Villani, Guido Compagni, Macchiavelli, Sismoude 
Sismondi, and Raynaldus, the continuer of Baronius. For more complete 
information, an article in the Universite Catholique for October, 1838, 
may be consulted. The dispute between the priesthood and the empire 
was made the subject of an especial examination in a little work I may be 
pardoned for citing, notwithstanding its incompleteness, both as to matter 
and to form: Deux Chanceliers d’ Angleterre (Paris, 1836); Part II., St, 
Thomas of Canterbury, reprinted in the Huvres completes, t. VII. 


372 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Il. 

And now, if we wish to determine Dante’s place amid the polit- 
ical commotions thus hastily sketched, a rapid examination of 
his actions and his writings will afford us the desired answer. 

1. The future exile from Florence “ still slept, a little lamb, 
within the fold of his native land” (he had scareely reached his 
fourth year), when the imperial family of the Hohenstaufen be- 
came extinct in the person of Conradin (1268). The ancient ri- 
valry between the princes of that house and the dukes of Bavaria 
could thenceforth be nothing more than a historical remembrance. 
The long-continued struggles between the monarchy and the pap- 
acy, having been fought out on the battle-field, were no longer 
agitated except in the chairs of canonists and jurisconsults. But, 
on the other hand, the two principles, the municipal and the 
feudal, as masters of the field, were rallying around them the 
Guelfs and the Ghibellines of Tuscany. Early a witness of these 
collisions, the young Alighieri naturally took part in them: he 
embraced the side of the people. That was the cause for which 
he bore arms at Campaldino; for it did he exercise the functions 
of ambassador to foreign parts while Giano della Bella endeayored 
to strengthen it by internal reforms. But the severity of that 
inflexible tribune repelled the nobility until then faithful to the 
standard of the Guelfs and sharing in the interest common to the 


whole city. A reaction in their favor occurred, and Giano della 


In the Thirteenth Century. 373 


Bella was banished (1294). Toward the same time, the inhabi- 
tants of Pistoja became involved in the dissensions dividing a 
powerful family of their city, and took sides under the appella- 
tions of Neréand Bianchi (Blacks and Whites). The leaders of the 
two parties, sent to Florence, carried to that place something yet 
lacking there, namely, new names for the new factions. The ple- 
beians adopted white as their color, while black was the ensign 
of the patricians. The mediation of Cardinal Acquasparta, legate 
of Boniface VIII., effected nothing, by reason of the obstinacy of 
the seditious. Blood had already been shed when Dante was 
named one of the six priors to whom the government was en- 
trusted during a period of two months (June 15, 1300). By 
his advice, the chiefs among the Whites and Blacks were sent off 
to the frontiers of the country. The former obtained a prompt 
recall; the latter, less favored, deputed one of their number to 
visit Rome, in order to set forth their claims. Dante was sent to 
the Holy See for the purpose of traversing these dangerous in- 
trigues. But Boniface VIIT. had already invited Charles of Valois, 
the brother of Philip the Fair, to retake Sicily, invaded by the 
Aragonese; he at the same time charged him with the task of re- 
establishing, as he passed along, quiet throughout Italy, confer- 
ring the twofold title of Captain of the Church and Pacificator. 
Nov. 4, 1301, Charles of Valois made his solemn entry into 


Florence ; but faithless to his glorious mission, he permitted the 


374 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Neri to enter with him, and with them came vengeance and dis- 
order. The Bianchi, to the number of six hundred, were exiled; 
and two sentences, successively pronounced by a prevaricating 
judge, condemned Dante, as contumacious, to a fine of five thou- 
sand small florins, to banishment, and to death by fire should he 
re-enter Florence (Jan. 27, and March 10, 1302).! 

These circumstances brought about a very remarkable change. 
The victors, champions of the nobility and deserters from the old 
party of the Guelfs, still retained the name of Guelf, which they 
justitied by their alliance with the French princes. They, in 
fact, sought the friendship of Robert of Naples, received from 


him, on several occasions, help in money and in men (1308- 


1 The second sentence of exile pronounced against Dante, long unpub- 
lished, was exhumed by Tiraboschi, vol. V. It is given entire in the ap- 
pendix to this work, as a singular monument of political and literary bar- 
barism. [The name of the Podesta who issued the two sentences was Cante 
de’ Gabrielli d’Agobbio. The first sentence imposed the fine, and ordered 
that if it were not paid within three days, Dante’s property was to be con- 
fiscated, and even if the fine Were paid, he was still condemned to remain 
outside the province of Tuscany during two years. Whether he paid or 
not, he was pronounced a forger and bribe-taker, and hence disqualified 
from holding any office in the gift of the Commune of Florence. The 
second sentence takes note that Dante had not obeyed the summons to 
appear before the Podesta, nor had he paid the fine, whence he was con- 
demned to be burned alive if ever he came within the jurisdiction of the 


City of Florence.—Tr. extracted from Scartazzini. ] 


In the Thirteenth Century. 375 


1311), solicited his presence in their city (1304-1310), and finally 
conferred upon him, for five years, the honors of the seigniory 
(1313). The vanquished, on their side, obeying the inevitable 
sympathy which results from community in misfortune, joined 
with the vanquished of an earlier period, and were numbered in 
the ranks of the Ghibelline party, where, amid memories of the 
Empire and regrets for feudal institutions, the feeling of hatred 
toward France held a dominant place. Dante, in the beginning, 
followed the example of his companions in exile; he took part in 
their fruitless effort to obtain by force of arms the re-opening to 
them of the gates of their native city (1304). Then, wearied by 
their narrow views and their ill-conducted measures, he fell back 
into inaction, whence he emerged only when the emperor Henry 
VII. arrived on the scene (1310). He penned an eloquent mani- 
festo in favor of that sovereign, and called upon him to turn his 
victorious arms against Florence :—an ever-deplorable document, 
which would have left an ineffaceable blot on the career of the 
poet had it not soon after been in a measure atoned for by a pa- 
triotic letter addressed by him to the cardinals, in which he 
sought to persuade them to elect an Italian pope (1314). Dur- 
ing this period he passed from one house to another of the most 
distinguished defenders of the Ghibelline cause; he became the 
friend of Uguecione della Fagginola, of Malaspina de Lunigiana, 


of Can Grande della Scala. But the haughty ways of these pow- 


376 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


erful families sometimes rendered the hospitality received from 
them painful to him. He found life pleasanter under the roofs of 
two illustrious Guelfs, Pagano della Torre, Patriarch of Aquileia, 


and Guido Novello, Lord of Ravenna, in whose arms he finally 
expired. Theaffections of his later years were thus easily re- 


knitted to the earliest predilections of his youth.} 





' Some historians have placed upon the Holy See the responsibility for 
the miseries that desolated Florence during the deplorable period we have 
just been considering. But, if we may judge of the policy of the popes 
by their acts. we cannot doubt the genuineness of their conciliatory in- 
tentions: we have only to examine the chronicle of Villani, who is not 
contradicted in this particular by any contemporary writer.—1273; Pope 
Gregory X. passes through Florence on his way to the Second Council of 
Lyons: he asks from the Guelfs a general amnesty in favor of the Ghibel- 
lines; on their refusal, he places the city under interdict.—1275; Renewed 
efforts on the part of the same pontiff for the re-establishing of peace.— 
1277; Nicholas III. sends Cardinal Latini to Tuscany, that the interrupted 
negotiations may be re-opened ; a general reconciliation, admission of the 
Ghibellines to public offices.—1300; First legation of Cardinal Acquas- 
parta, commissioned by Boniface VIII., to prevent the collisions between 
the Neri and the Bianchi.—1301 ; The same cardinal, for a second time leg- 
ate of Boniface VIII., goes to Florence to allay the disorders accompany- 
ing the entrance of Charles of Valois.—1304; Benedict XI. confides to the 
Cardinal de Prato the care of bringing the exiled Bianchi back into their 
country : the cardinal is unable to overcome the obstinacy of the victori- 
ous faction, and pronounces against it the sentence of excommunication.— 
1307 ; Renewed and still unsuccessful mediation of Cardinal Napoleon Or- 
sini, legate of Pope Clement V., etc., etc.—We quote the closing lines of the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 377 


2. These facts will receive full explanation if we compare them 
with the doctrines of which they are the outward expression. To 
begin with, Dante never gave to the house of Hohenstaufen the 
enthusiastic veneration with which it was regarded by its ancient 
partisans. He branded the emperor Frederic II. with the merit- 
ed name of heretic, consigning him to eternal torments with his 
most noted accomplices, Cardinal Octavian, Pietro delle Vigne, 
Eccelino da Romano. It is true that he made himself the apolo- 


gist of the Holy Empire; he became at once its historian, its jur- 





Pontifical letter conferring his second mission upon Cardinal Acquaspar- 
ta: “* To the end that these things may be accomplished more profitably 
and effectually, in peace and quiet, we are careful to appoint thee, in 
whose justice, goodness, cireumspection, and mature experience we con- 
fide, to these duties, granting thee authority in that same our province: 
protected by thy favor, directed by thy counsel, and aided by thy matur- 
ity, the said Count of Valois may, with moderation and measure, more 
tranquilly and usefully discharge the office committed to him according to 
the divine precepts, and in conformity with the divine good pleasure and 
with ours. Wherefore we earnestly pray, admonish, and exhort thee, 
Brother, charging thee by the Apostolic commands, that, girding thyself 

wiftly, thou speed in person to those parts; ... that thouaddress thyself 
and thy endeavors toward sowing the seed of charity and peace, so that 
the whirlwinds of wars and dissensions (which have exceedingly prevailed 
there) being appeased, that province, so sorely shaken by conflicts, may, 
as it were, after the darkness of night, behold the light of flowery [flourish- 
ing] days. ...”’ [The reader must remember that the city was Florence.— 
TRANS. ] 


378 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


isconsult, and its theologian. But his doctrine was not that of 
the servile publicists; monarchy, as he understands it, is not the 
despotism of a military chief, the supreme representative of a sys- 
tematic feudalism, uniting under his dominion all the countries 
once conquered by the German sword; it is a peaceable, civilizing, 
and universal sovereignty : instituted for the best interests of all, 
it preserves the liberty of each one, it rectifies such inequalities 
as tend to destroy the general level; and finally, it claims no 
rights over the interior court of conscience, nor over the internal 
constitution of the Church. On the contrary, the Church is ree- 
ognized as a distinct power, divine in its origin, inviolable in its 
action; the priesthood and the empire (each independent of the 
other in its own sphere) are mutually subordinated, the one to the 
other, in their relations: the pontiff is the temporal: vassal of 
Cxesar, but the emperor is of the spiritual flock of St. Peter. Thus, 
in the famous controversy which, during three hundred years, 
had occupied the minds and divided the opinions of doctors and 
statesmen, the philosopher-poet strove to fill the difficult part of 


conciliator.! 


1 We are aware that he failed in his well-meant intention. The treatise 
De Monarchia was stricken by ecclesiastical censure. In fact, was not a 
system which established the absolute suzerainty of a prince in the tem- 
poral order, which freed him from all control, and made him responsible 
to no tribunal in this world, which denied to the pontiff the power of re- 
leasing subjects from their oaths of fealty, dangerous for all nations in 
times so near to those of Frederic U., and Philip the Fair ? 





In the Thirteenth Century. 379 


Yet, when thus advocating the cause of the Empire, he at- 
tacked with fiery logic feudal privileges, the inheritability of 
offices, and even that of property. W-hile he took a certain 
vleasure in mortifying the pride of the rising seigniories, he 
could not restrain the overflowing of filial love toward the free 
city which had proscribed him. But the city of his love was the 
old Florence, with the gravity of its government, the severe in- 
nocence of its manners, the peaceful and happy life led by its 
people; that was the ideal country whose dear image he kept in 
his heart amid the most distressful realities. He held in slight 
esteem the new men and the new institutions: the corruption of 
the old Florentine blood by the immigration of strangers, the in- 
trusion of parvenus into the magistracy, the instability of the 
laws, the eagerness of the crowd to mingle in the conduct of pub- 
lic affairs ;—all these conditions, inseparable from democracy, be- 
came to him subjects for ceaseless complaint and pitiless sarcasm. 
Himself the scion of a noble family, he kept in the depths of his 
soul a patrician turn of mind, the frequent expression of which 
in his poem contrasts singularly with the democratic doctrines 


set forth in his prose writings.! Finally, if he showed himself in- 


1 See the beginning of Sect. II. of the present chapter, the whole of Book 
IV. of the Convito, and the following passages: Inferno, xv., 21; Purga- 
torio, vi., 44; Paradiso, xvi., 1,17. We cannot agree with Foscoto (La 
Comedia di Dante illustrata) when he suggests that certain pages of 
the Convito, written amid the sorrows of exile, may have been intended to 
flatter the party of the Guelfs, in order to pave the way for a re-opening to 
Dante of the gates of his native city. The Canzone explained in*Book iv. 
of the Convito, is a work of the poet’s youth: the commentary was written 
between the years 1302 and 1308. Hence we see in it a serious conviction, 
twice set forth, under different forms. 


380 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


imical to the French, it was for a reason which justifies him and 
honors us. He had well apprehended that distinctive trait in our 
national character, that bold-spirited effusiveness which in all 
times carried our arms and our ideas beyond the limits of our own 
borders, a trait menacing the political and the moral independence 
of our neighbors. He beheld, in the course of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, no less than five diadems—the crown of Jerusalem, of Con- 
stantinople, of England, of Sicily, and of Navarre—placed, with 
varying fortunes, upon the heads of our soldiers and our princes.! 
He was dismayed at the sight of so much glory, and held up to 
the mistrust of his contemporaries the royal race of Capet, ‘‘ which 
was obstructing the whole world.” ? His jealous patriotism was 
more especially roused by undertakings which seemed to imperil 
Italian liberty, such as the conquest of Naples, the carrying off 
of Boniface VIII., and the removal of the Holy See beyond the 
Alps. If, in view of these repeated enterprises, he invoked the 
imperial power and greeted with applause the appearance of Hen- 
ry. VII., he never laid_aside his horror of foreign domination ; he 


had no intention of conferring upon the Germans rights refused 





1 Baldwin, Count of Flanders, Emperor of Constantinople (1204); John 
of Brienne, King of Jerusalem (1209); Louis VIII., called to the throne of 
England by the revolted barons (1215); Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily 
(1265); Philip the Fair, heir to the kingdom of Navarre (1284). 


2 Purgatorio, xx., 15. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 381 


to their rivals on the other side of the Rhine. He made no pro- 
fession of any especial respect for that grave nation, and admired 
the gluttony of the Teuton as little as he did the vanity of the 
Gaul.! 

But, faithful to- his principles, he reverenced in the Em- 
peror the head of the human race, not the chief of any isolated 
people, the King of the Romans, themselves the kings of the 
world, and hence the natural protector of Italy. This is why he 
invited him ‘to visit this garden of the Empire wasted by war, 
and to end the widowhood of the noble spouse who day and night 
weeps over his desertion.” ? 

Thus, through his respect for the Church, through his philo- 
sophical attacks upon feudalism, Dante inclined toward the party 
of the Guelfs; the monarchical principles which he professed, 
and the enmity that he nourished against France, brought him 
into relations with the Ghibellines. But the effect of these two 
differing impulses was not to impel him now one way and now 
another, in two contrary directions: he followed, not without 
sundry deviations, but without pusillanimity, the mean line thence 
resulting. He did not wander, an irresolute deserter, between 
the two rival camps; he set up his tent on independent ground, 


not that he might repose in an indifferent neutrality, but that he 





1 Inferno, xvii., 7; xxix., 41. 2 Purgatorio, vi., 33, 38. 


382 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


might fight out the fight alone, with all the strength of his own 
individual genius. When the factions seemed to be drawing him 
in as a partaker in their turbulent movements, and to be making 
him a sharer in their crimes, he loudly protested against them; 
his stern words of blame fell, as biows from an untiring arm, al- 
ternately on the heads of the authors and of the companions of 
his exile, on the Neri and on the Bianchi, on the Ghibellines and 
on the Guelfs.' He had no fear of increasing the number of 
his enemies in the ranks of his contemporaries, provided he might 
keep his name pure from every humiliating alliance in the eyes 
of posterity. Posterity long ago falsified this his legitimate hope. 
But the present progress of historical studies now leaves vulgar 
prejudices without excuse. The hour has come to restore to the 
old Alighieri the wished for testimony which he caused his an- 
eestor, Cacciaguida, to render to him in the remarkable interview 
described in the Paradiso, namely, that he never confounded his 
cause with that of an impious race of men, and that he cou'd 


claim the glory of being himself alone his own party.? 





1 Paradiso, Vi., 34; xvii., 31. 
2 Paradiso, xvii., 33. L. 
Thou shalt abandon every thing beloved 
Most tenderly, and this the arrow is 
Which first the bow of banishment shoots forth. 
Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going down and up anotber’s stairs. 


II,— Beatrice. 


INFLUENCE OF WOMEN IN CHRISTIAN Soogmnty, AND OF CATHONI> 
SYMBOLISM IN THE ARTS.—S?. I-v¢Y.—THE 
BLESSED VIRGIN. 

HE personality of Beatrice has much exercised the penetrat- 
2 ive powers of biographers and commentators. For some, 
she is simply a young girl loved with a human love, and taking 
her place amid the throng of such graceful personages celebrated 
in elegiac song in every country andin every age. For others, she 
is an allegorical creation, presenting under a visible form an ab- 
stract idea, which following different interpretations, might be The- 


ology, Grace, or Liberty. Others again attribute tothe beautiful 


oe 








And which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders 

Will be the bad and foolish company 

With which into this valley thou shalt fall ; 
For ail ingrate, all mad and impious 

Will they become against thee; but soon after 

They, and not thou, shall have the forehead scarlet. 
Of their bestiality their own proceedings 

Shall furnish proof; so ‘twill be well for thee 

A party to have made thee by thyself, 

383 


384 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Florentine a double role, real in the life of the poet, and figurative 
in the structure of the poem. Ourselves holding to this last men- 
tioned view, we have thus far only partially indicated the proofs 
supporting our opinion: we must now set these forth more large- 
ly, and look at them in relation to some general considerations 
which may perhaps throw a new light upon them. Thus, a brief 
examination into the influence accorded to women in Christian 
society will enable us to understand what Beatrice may have been 
to Dante; and, on the other hand, a rapid review of the re- 
sources which the Arts found in Catholic theology, will readily 
permit us to divine what Dante could do for Beatrice. 
Tf 

1. The condition of woman in the ancient world seemed close- 
ly connected with a primitive tradition, contained in the records 
of China and Greece as well as in those of Judea: That the com- 
panion oy man had become his temptress, and that through her, evil 
had entered into the world. The anathema naturally fell the more 
heavily on the head of her who had called it forth. She was 
then excluded from the ranks of civil society, the laws of which 
declared her stricken with a perpetual incapacity, consigned to 
the lowest rank in the family, degraded in her own person by im- 
prisonment, polygamy, and divorce, and reduced to the condition 
of being no more than the slave and the chattel of man, When 


she sought to free herself from the pressure of this harsh destiny, 


In the Thiricenth Century. 385 


when she flung open the doors of the household prison, when by 
the publicity of her charms she endeavored in her turn to subju- 
gate warriors, philosophers, and artists, she only succeeded in 
making them sharers in her degradation; when she had become 
the mistress, she found in this name merely another species of 
shame: men then called her Helen, Aspasia, or Phryne. Be- 
tween servitude and this blameworthy empire, there was no ref- 
uge for her except in the shadow of the temple, under the veil of 
virginity, among the priestesses and vestals; and who can say if 
some traditional memory was not even there preserved of the or- 
acle which had announced the intervention of a virgin in the re- 
demption of the world? 

In fact, as Christianity, through the doctrine of the Incarna- 
tion, rehabilitated the whole human race, so, by that of the divine 
maternity, did it lift woman from her own especial degradation. 
While it did not destroy for her any more than for man the ma- 
terial consequences of the Fall, it did make good its disastrous 
moral results. In religion, it was impossible not to recognize as 
a fact, the inequality of the sexes, but the equality of souls was 
duly professed. The daughters of Eve were deemed too fragile 
to bear the burden of the priesthood, but they shared in the 
power of prayer and in the respect due to virtue. Saintly wom- 
en received the honors of canonization, and pontiffs, amid all the 


splendors of a solemn liturgy, bent the knee in presence of their 


386 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


effigies. In civil life, they continued outside of the cares and 
perils attendant upon power, but they enjoyed civil liberty. They 
moulded manners, which are of greater weight than laws. They 
held the initiative in education, on which depends the future of 
any people; to them was committed the sacred magistracy of 
alms: their domain included childhood, sorrow, and poverty, that 
is to say, the largest part of all human things. Similar changes 
took place within the family circle. The mother sat among her 
children, a queen beside the home hearth; the wife exercised a 
pious apostolate in regard to her husband; sisters became the 
guardian angels of their brothers. Down to any depths of isola- 
tion to which misfortune or penitence might condemn these frail 
beings, they preserved not only their personal dignity, but even, 
so to speak, their social rank. They could call by the sweet name 
of son the new-born babe whom they bore in their arms to the la- 
ver of baptism. They found in the priest a father who stood ready 
to wipe away their tears. Faith united them by the bonds of a 
real fraternity, by an unceasing interecommunion, with millions of 
fellow-Christians. 

One might say that thenceforth nothing great was to be ac- 
complished within the bosom of the Church without some woman 
participating in the deed. First, many of them stood as mar- 
tyrs in the amphitheatres; others shared with the anchorites the 


possession of the desert. Ere long, Constantine set up the Lab- 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 387 


arum at the Capitol, and St. Helena planted the cross on the 
ruins of Jerusalem. Clovis at Tolbiac invoked the God of Clotilda. 
Meantime, the tears of Monica were redeeming the errors of Au- 
gustine; Jerome was dedicating the Vulgate to the piety of two 
Roman ladies, Paula and Eustochium; St. Basil and St. Benedict, 
the first legislators of the cenobitic life in the East and in the 
West, were being aided by their sisters, Macrina, and Scholastica. 
Later, the Countess Matilda upholds with her chaste hands 
the tottering throne of Gregory VII.; the wisdom of Queen 
Blanche is felt throughout the reign of St. Louis; Joan of Are 
saves France; Isabella of Castile presides over the discovery of 
anew world. Finally, in times nearer to our own, we see St. 
Theresa standing amid the group of bishops, doctors, and founders 
of orders, by whom the internal reform of Catholic society was 
accomplished: St. Francis de Sales cultivates the soul of Madame 
de Chantal as a most precious flower, and St. Vincent de Paul 
entrusts Louise de Marillac with the most admirable of his de- 
signs, the establishment of the Daughters of Charity. 

2. Thus far, we have considered the influence of Christian 
women as exercised in spheres above all suspicion, within the 
inflexible circle of duty. We are now to watch its development 
under forms less austere, modified by the requirements of sur- 
rounding conditions, and even sometimes lending itself to the 
exigencies of human passions that it may direct their perilous 


impulses. 


388 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


We readily recognize something akin to this in the chivalric 
usages of the Middle Ages, before such usages had degenerated 
jnto mere profane gallantry. Chivalry was originally a sacred 
institution, an order exacting from its members solemn vows and 
numerous observances. In return, they received the mission of 
waging war; they became the ministers in this world of the God 
of battles; they were called upon to realize among the still un- 
tamed peoples the eternal idea of Good. Guardians of every 
kind of helplessness, they protected those needing their aid with 
a zeal proportioned to the touching nature of the claims made 
upon them, succoring the despoiled widow, the betrayed wife, 
the orphan exposed to the violence of an unjust lord, the aceused 
whose innocence demanded a champion. Among inese fair cli- 
ents, there was often one who attracted the especial preference of 
the knight. Sometimes it was an illustrious princess toward whom 
he dared not lift his eyes, sometimes an unknown dame whose 
name he never learned: then a look, a smile, paid the entire re- 
ward due to his long continued service. And yet this respectful 
tenderness, a feeling so delicate that we should profane it were 
we to bestow upon it any other name, exerted a powerful influence 
over the heart. Doubtless, it could not altogether renovate the 
wild blood still coursing through the veins of the knight, but it 
could moderate its effervescence. Military pride voluntarily 


humbled itself; the career of arms became ennobled through the 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 389 


adoption of a disinterested motive; sensual instincts were dis- 
pelled at the call of honor—honor, that manly modesty which for- 
bade a brave man to commit any action that could call a blush to 
the countenance of his lady. It was notin vain that he proclaimed 
her the queen of his thoughts; ever present to his mind, she often 
caused him to triumph over himself, and hence still more easily 
over his enemies. More than one noble chatelaine thus even 
from the seclusion of her oratory contributed to the maintenance 
of discipline in the camp, perhaps to the attaining of victory on 
the battle-field. 

But chivalry may also be regarded as a public institution; it 
formed the first step in the feudal hierarchy. From this point of 
view, it enjoyed in Italy but a doubtful popularity. When in 
various cities a decree of ostracism was pronounced against the 
families of the nobility, this name embraced all that counted a 
knight as a member. Amid the common equality, the sole per- 
sonal distinetion to which the ambition of the citizen could aspire, 
the only national glory looked upon-as the especial appanage of 
Italy among the peoples of Europe, was the glory pertaining to 
the Arts. Art thus became for those who faithfully devoted 
themselves to its service, an august ministry: their mission was 
to seek, amid the chaos of fallen nature, the scattered remains of 
the primal design, then to reproduce these in new works, to grasp 


and to express the divine idea of the Beautiful. Now, among the 


390 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


works of God, there was one that seemed to crown all the rest. 
the one that embellished the solitude of Eden and ravished the 
father of the race at his first awaking from slumber. The mar- 
vellous attraction experienced by him has not ceased to be felt in 
the souls of his sons. But the common herd of men appreciate 
beauty chiefly on its sensuous side ; they approach it only in tran- 
sitory wnions, whence issues a posterity destined to die. The ar- 
tist, on the contrary, beholds it on its intelligible side; he perceives 
mirrored in it a ray from on high; he pursues and possesses it 
by contemplation; in his fruitful ecstasy, he engenders immortal 
productions. To this has been given the name of Platonie love. 
Plato set forth its theory in the books of the Pheedrus and the 
Banquet. But the perversity of the pagan world did not allow of 
the application of such doctrines. Catholic society in the thir- 
teenth century offered more favorable conditions. Already, from 
the banks of the Adige to the pharos of Messina, rose a concert 
of poetic voices. Amid the hills of Umbria, St. Francis of Assisi 
improvised hymns, wherein his ardent charity overflowed down 
even to the humblest creatures. The Blessed Jacopone de Todi 
composed religious ¢anticles in prison. Outside of the cloister, a 
larger liberty authorized Guittone of Arezzo to sing by turns the 
Queen of Angels and the daughters of men. Guido Cavaleante 
wrote the famous canzone defining the nature of love, the com- 


pletely philosophic thought of which attracted the attention of 


In the Thirteenth Century. 391 


the doctors. The rhymes of Dante de Majano took captive the 
heart of Mina, the Sicilian, whom he never saw. The star of Pe- 
trarch was soon to rise. Such was the epoch which gave birth to 
the narration we are about to read—the beginning of the Vita 
Nuova, the first work of Dante, the preface, perhaps, to the Divine 
Comedy. 

3. “ Already nine times since my birth had the heaven of light 
accomplished its revolution on itself, when there appeared to my 
eyes the glorious lady of my thoughts, who was called Beatrice 
by many who knew not wherefore she was so called, Since she 
had existed in this life, the starry heaven had passed over from 
west to east the twelfth part of a degree, so that I beheld her 
about the beginning of her ninth year, and toward the close of 
mine. She appeared to me garbed in a most noble color, a mod- 
est and becoming red, and girdled and adorned as befitted her 
youthful age. At that moment, I say truly that the spirit of life 
which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to 
tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least 
pulses, and trembling said these words: Behold a god stronger 
than I, who has come to rule over me. Atthe same instant, the in- 
tellectual spirit, which dwells in the high chamber whereto the 
spirits of the senses carry all their perceptions, was stricken with 
wonder, and, addressing himself to the spirits of sight, said: 


Now has your beatitude appeared. However, the natural spirit, 


392 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


which dwells in that part where our nourishment is supplied, be- 
gan to weep, and weeping said these words: Woe is me! for I 
shall henceforth be often troubled. From that hour, Love was mas- 
ter of my soul, which had so suddenly inclined to him; and he 
began to exercise over me such control and such lordship, through 
the power that my imagination gaye to him, that it behooved me 
to do completely all his pleasure. He commanded me oftimes 
that I should seek to see this youthful angel, so that I in my boy- 
hood often went seeking her, and saw her of such noble and 
praiseworthy deportment, that truly of her might be said that 
word of the poet Homer: ‘She seemeth not the daughter of mor- 
tal man, but of God.’ And albeit her image, which stayed con- 
stantly with me, gave boldness to Love to hold lordship over me, 
yet it was of such noble virtue that it never suffered that Love 
should rule me without the faithful counsel of the Reason in those 


matters in which it were useful to hear such counsel.” ! 





1 The erudite expressions so prodigally employed in this first page of the 
Vita Nuova, cannot be regarded as a mere display of useless learning. 
On the contrary, we find in them the mystic sense which the{poet attached 
to the emotions of his childhood, his anxious care to avoid every sugges- 
tion of an ordinary passion, in fine, his desire to render most solemn the 
first appearance of Beatrice. On the other hand, in presence of so many 
precise indications, it becomes impossible to reduce her who bears this 
name to the exclusive role of an abstract idea. An abstract idea nine years 
old! Theology scarcely yet ready to throw aside its swaddling bands in 
the thirteenth century of the Christian era! Boccaccio (Vita di Dante) 
relates the meeting of the two children, and Benyenuto da Imola recalls 


In the Thirteenth Century. 393 


Beginning from that day, May Ist, 1274, Dante continues the 
history of his interior life, and permits us to be present at the 
simultaneous development of his conscience and his genius. 
Beatrice was for him a type of perfection, a something celestial to 
which he must attain by disengaging himself from the slime of 
vicious inclinations, and by tending upward through the sus- 
tained effort of an indefatigable will. Still a child, a secret voice 
called upon him often to visit the neighboring house, wherein 
the young girl was growing up, and whence he returned always 
better and better. Later, at the age when the passions assert 
their power, amid the temptations natural to a fiery temperament, 
surrounded by undisciplined youths who rarely hesitated at the 


shedding of blood, it was quite enough that he should have seen, 





its main features: ‘* When a certain Falco Portinari, an honorable citizen 
of Florence, according to custom made an entertainment celebrating the 
Kalends of May, having invited his neighbors with their dames, Dante, 
then a boy of nine years old, accompanied his father, Alighieri, who was 
one of the numerous company. He (Dante) saw at the house among 
other young girls, a child, the daughter of the said Falco, aged eight years, 
a wonder of beauty, but of still greater excellence. This wondersuddenly 
penetrated into his heart in such a way thatit never departed thence so long 
as life endured, whether from conformity of disposition and bebavior, or 
through some special influence of the heavens. And with his years contin- 
ually increased the flames of love; whence Dante, wholly given up to her 
image, followed her whithersoever she went, believing that in her eyes 
he beheld the sovereign beatitude.’”” The name of Falco Portinari is in- 
scribed among those of the benefactors of the hospital, Santa Maria Novel- 
la, on a stone tablet still preserved within that fine building. 


394 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


even from afar, the pious countenance of his beloved, to render 
him incapable of evil, to restore to him the energy of well-doing. 
She appeared to him among her young companions as an immor- 
tal being descended from on high to endue with honor the weak- 
ness of women here below and to protect their virtue. 

When she knelt at the foot of the altar, he beheld her, crowned 
with an aureole, associated with the power of the blessed in heay- 
en, intereeding for sinners; and he felt prayer more readily and 
more confidently flow from his own lips. But, when he stood by 
the way, awaiting her return, and received from her the kindly 
greeting of Christian fraternity, he alone is capable of expressing 
what he then felt. ‘“ As soon as she appeared, a sudden flame of 
charity was enkindled within me, which made me pardon all and 
have no more enemies. When she was about to salute me,a 
spirit of love annihilated for the moment all the other sensitive 
spirits, leaving strength to those of sight alone, and saying to 
them: Go and honor your sovereign! And one who wished to 
know what it is to love, would have learned it by seeing all my 
limbs tremble. Then, at the moment when that noble lady bowed 
her head to greet me, nothing could veil the dazzling brightness 
which filled my sight; I stood as if stricken by an unendurable 
beatitude. ... So that in that alone was found the last end of all 
my desires; in that alone rested my happiness, a happiness far 


surpassing the capacity of my soul.” Moreover, this impression 


In the Thirteenth Century. 395 


was so vivid and so disinterested, that Dante fancied it shared by 
many others, and rejoiced that it should be so.“ When the noble 
Lady walked through the streets of the city, people ran to see her 
pass, which gave me great joy; and those whom she came near 
were seized by so respectful a feeling that they did not dare to 
lift their eyes. She, wrapping herself in her humility asin a veil, 
passed on without seeming affected by what the crowd said and 
did. And when she had gone by, some cried out as they walked 
away, ‘Thisis no woman, but one of the fairest angels from heav- 
en.’ ‘A miracle,’ answered others, ‘ Blessed be God, who can 
fashion such admirable works! ’” 

But the will cannot take so high a flight without carrying the 
understanding along with it: the affections cannot become en. 
nobled without a corresponding enrichment of ideas; the trans- 
port of the understanding and the plentitude of ideas are mani- 
fested in the fecundity of the word. Thus the potent charm 
which held dominion over the mind of Dante did not hold him in 
ablindeaptivity. The remembrance of Beatrice illumined his vigils, 
encouraged his labors, and did not drive from his memory the 
learned lessons of Brunetto Latini. 

He delivered from the latter the elements of the arts and 
sciences; from the former he received the inspiration which 
vivifies and holds them in mutual relation. Between the grave 


secretary of the republic and the gentle daughter of Porti- 


396 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


nari, the predestined youth had no difficulty in entering upon 
the path that leads to fame. At the age of eighteen, the need 
of communicating his secret emotions to a small number 
of friends led him to pen his earliest verses, which were fol- 
lowed by a long series of sonnets, canzoni, sirvente, and ballads 
—the ever more vivid outpouring of his chaste love, and more 
brilliant fore-shadowing of his poetic future. At first there 
appeared enigmas and plays upon words, strange dreams whose 
meaning was to be guessed; sixty names gathered together ina 
single sirvente, so that the chosen one might be placed there with- 
out fear of betrayal; aimless hopes and motiveless alarms. All 
this was the childish shame-facedness of a new-born passion and 
of a novice in the art of writing. Soon, to the fear of profane in- 
terpretation was added the impatience to be understood: then 
came allusions, veiled but not concealed; circumstances adroitly 
used ; words of joy and harmonious sighs corresponding to all the 
joys and all the sorrows of the beloved ; confidences prepared from 
afar off and half withheld. The thought and the expression be- 
come more and more refined; they acquire a virginal grace and 
delicacy. Finally, the feeling once so timid, now tried by experi- 
ence and reflection, sure of its own legitimacy, is ready to-brave the 
light of day. For her whom he so long honored by a-secret. ven- 
eration, Dante is about to prepare a public triumph, and hence- 


forth nothing will be too precious for him to -uge to this end; he 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 397 


will count neither the boldness of the forms selected nor the 
abundance of his figures, the contrast of coloring nor the difficul- 
ties of rhyme and rhythm. We here recognize the virile genius 
whom the capricious language of Italy is to obey, to whose work 
“heaven and earth will lend a hand.” The following fragment 
marks, so to speak, the transition from the second to the third 
manner, perhaps the most interesting moment in the poet’s history: 
** Ladies who have intelligence of love, 

With you of my loved lady I would speak ; 

Not yainly thinking to exhaust her praise, 

But in discoursing to relieve my mind. 

I say that in reflecting on her worth, 

Love’s inspiration is so sweetly felt, 

That, if my courage did not fail me then, 


The world should be enamor’d by my words. 


* * * * * * * 


An angel in the dialect divine 
Exclaims, and says: Sire, in the world is seen 
A miracle in action, which proceeds 
From a fair soul whose splendor mounts thus high. 
Heaven, that no want had ever known but her, 
Entreats to have her presence of its Lord, 
And every saint aloud implores the grace. 
Pity alone opposes our request. 
What is Madonna’s doom? What God’s decree? 
My well-beloved, suffer now in peace 


That, while my pleasure is, your hope should stay 


398 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Where there is one who must abide her loss, 

And who shall say to the condemn’d in hell, 

The hope of blessed spirits I have seen 
Madonna is in highest heaven desired : 

Now will I tell you of her excellence. 

I say then that the lady who would show 

True gentleness should walk with her; for when 

She moves, Love ¢asts o’er vulgar hearts a chill, 

Which freezes and destroys their every thought ; 

And he whom Love permits to see her long, 

A thing ennobled will become, or die ; 

And when one finds that he may worthy be 

To look on her, his virtue thus is proved ; 

For he receives the gift, conferring health, 

And humbleth him till he forgets all wrong. 

And God hath given her for greater grace, 

That wbo hath spoke with her cannot end ill.’’? 


The mournful presentiments blended with these transports were 
speedily to be justified. ‘The Lord called to Himself this young 
saint; He was minded to make her shine in glory, under the en- 
signs of the august Queen, Mary, whose name she had always re- 
vered.” Beatrice died on the ninth day of June, in the year of Our 


Lord, 1292. How then relate the grief of the poet, when, in the 





1 The New Life, Canzone I. [English translation of Charles Lyell, A. M., 
with the exception of a few lines bettered by that of C. Eliot Nortun, and 


by the use of a suggestion of Fraticelli’s.—Tr.]. 


In the Thirteenth Century. ~ 39g 


bewilderment of his thoughts, he wrote to all the princes of the 
earth to notify them of this loss, as of a presage menacing the 
future of the world; when his eyes, inexhaustible fountains of 
tears, seemed to him no longer anything but ‘“ two desires of 
weeping”? And yet, when time had lightened the sombre mem- 
ories of the bed of death and the sepulehre, and the tokens of 
mourning had passed outof sight, she whom Dante had loved lived 
on in his memory, radiant, immortal, more beautiful than ever, 
more than ever potent. She lived for him a second life, she 
brought to him light and inspiration.'_ From that hour, the songs 
that had been interrupted began again: now she was extolled as 
having left without regret the state of exile of this world that she 
might enter into the abode of eternal peace; then the song would 
commemorate the anniversary of the day when she was placed by 
the side of the Blessed Virgin in that portion of heaven peopled 
by the humble; and again, she would be represented as seen amid 
the topmost heights of the Empyrean, receiving unexampled 
honors.” 

But these fugitive preludes announced a greater work: a mar- 


yellous apparition suggested the design of it; and with this ends 





1 Convito, ii., 2: ‘* That blessed Beatrice, who lives in heaven with the 





angels, and on the earth with my soul,” 
2 See the Canzone: ** The eyes that grieve,’ and the Sonnets : ** The gen- 
tle lady to my mind had come;”’ ** Beyond the sphere,’’ C. E. Norton’s Tr. 


400 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the Vita Nuova. ‘“ After having written the verses that have 
been cited, I was visited by an admirable vision, in which I was 
permitted to contemplate such matters that I determined to speak 
no more of that blessed one until the time came when I could 
speak more worthily of her; I am now making every effort to fulfil 
my intention, as she truly knows. If then it may please Him for 
whom and through whom all creatures exist, to grant me a few 
more years of life, 1 hope to say of her that which has never 
been said of any other; and when my task shall be completed, 
may it please Him who is the Lord of Grace, that my soul may go 
to rejoice in the glory of my well-beloved, of that blessed Beatrice 
who in glory looks upon the face of Him, who is Blessed forever 
and ever!” ! 

From this simple exposition may doubtless be inferred the real, 
historical existence of Beatrice and the purity of the love which 
she inspired; but we may also perceive a new and entirely poetic 
era beginning in regard to her, the first glimmerings of her apothe- 
osis. The vision is to receive its explanation, and we are to 
see what art, aided by Christianity, can do in the way of glorify- 


ing human nature. 
IKE 


1, And here we must revert to the origin of Christian symbol- 





1 The New Life. The preceding pages are merely a brief but faithful 
analysis of that work. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 401 


ism, traces of which we have already frequently indicated.! An- 
cient philosophy had attempted, but unsuccessfully, to solve a 
difficult problem, namely, to reconcile and unite the two principles 
of knowledge and existence—the Ideal and the Real. The Pla- 
tunists recognized the existence of ideas, but went astray in 
futile efforts to give them an independent life: they were led to 
deify the abstractions they had dreamed of: thence the paganism 
of Plotinus and Proclus. The Peripatetics stopped at the study 
of realities ; but they spent themselves in vain labors to bring 
these into categories which often had no value but a logical or a 
purely arbitrary one: they left science exposed to the danger of 
materialism. The theology of the Fathers decided the question 
by the light of faith, permitting some philosophical difficulties still 
to subsist, which difficulties were subsequently taken up by the 
schools. Theology showed the real and the ideal blended from 
the beginning in the primal Unity, and thence finding themselves 
united in every step of creation, in every phase of history. In 
fact, the eternal Word is the word that God utters to Himself, the 
image which He engenders, the infinite idea which He conceives. 
It is at the same time a distinct Reality, a divine Person. What 
the Word is in Himself, He reflects in His works. Thus, all 


created beings have a substance which is proper to them, an in- 





1 See above, Part I., Chap. iv. 


402 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


communicable essence; they cannot be reduced, as they are by 
oriental pantheism, to mere phantoms and shadows: and yet 
we read in their visible forms the invisible thoughts of their 
Author; nature is a living language. In the same way, the in- 
spired writings contain doctrines typified by actions, truths per- 
sonified under the names of men; the whole of revelation is de- 
veloped in a series of events which are signs. Thence the system 
of interpretation which passed from the Synagogue to the Church, 
from St. Paul toSt. Augustine, and from St. Augustine to St. 
Thomas, a system attributing to the sacred books two senses, one 
literal and the other mystical.! The mystical sense was still 
further subdivided according as it related to the coming of Christ, 
so the future life, or to the divers states of the soul in its present 
condition. The philosophers of the Middle Ages found types on 
every page of the Bible to define, to depict, and to animate their 
most abstract conceptions; we see a striking example of this in 
the treatise of Richard of St. Victor, de Preparatione ad contem- 
plationem, where the family of Jacob is taken to symbolize the 
family of the human faculties. Rachel and Lia there fill the 


roles of the intellect and the will; the two sons of Rachel, Joseph 





1$t. Paul, I. Corinth., x.; Galat., iv.; Hebr., x.—St. Peter, 1, 3.—Or- 
igen, de Principiis, 4.—St. Jerome, in Oseam., 2.—Cassian, Collat., 14, 
4,—St. Augustine, de Utilitate credendi, 3.—St. Eucher, Liber formu- 


larum.—St. Thomas, Summa, pars q. 1, art. 10; Quodlibeta, 7, art. 16. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 403 


and Benjamin, are in their turn taken to represent the two main 
operations of the intellect, namely, knowledge and contemplation. 
One would seareely believe with what subtlety and charm the 
relations of the objects compared are pursued down to their last 
terms.! 

This twofold function, historical and allegorical, attributed to 
the personages of the Old Testament, was still better suited to 
the saints of the New Law. A saint, in the eyes of faith, is a 
great man; that is to say, he reproduces heroically in his own 
person some of the most excellent atributes pertaining to human- 
ity: he has banished from his heart selfish affections, egotistic 
passions, that their place may be occupied by qualities that are of 
all times and all places, justice, charity, wisdom. In him, the me 
is effaced in presence of the moral idea to the honoring of which 
he has devoted his life; he becomes the example of that idea, and 
consequently its type. But the saints in heaven are not merely 
abiding types offered to the admiration of the world; they inter- 
vene in its fortunes by means of a mysterious power known un- 
der the name of patronage. Patronage is not limited to a simple 
individual relation determined by a baptismal name selected at will; 


it is exercised on a much larger scale and according to more cer- 





1 Thus, in the eestasy of contemplation, the conscious intellect evan- 
ishes : this is Rachel dying in the act of giving birth to Benjamin. De 
Preeparatione anime ad contemplationem, cap. liv. 


404 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


tain laws. Families, cities, kingdoms, have glorious mediators, 
who are of their blood or have been chosen through gratitude ; 
during many ages, the orders in the state, learned societies, cor- 
porations of artisans, lovingly celebrated those who had sancti- 
fied their especial class of life or labor. Every condition and 
every age still has its privileged intercessors. There are places 
protected by arevered memory; every day in the year is placed 
under some invocation which consecrates it. The saints also di- 
vide among them the influencing of consciences : some of them are 
presumed to be mainly interested in the virtues wherein they most 
excelled; others take pity on the frailties from which they them- 
selves were not always exempt; there are consolers for all afflic- 
tions, guardians against every peril; there are pious guides for 
every species of study, for every exercise of genius.’ So that 
these elect of God represent every condition of human nature; 
they represent such conditions, not merely under favor of a sim- 
ple association of ideas, but in virtue of a special power which 
constitutes a portion of their glory and their felicity. It would 
take us too long here to dwell upon the beautiful harmonies sug- 
gested by the choice of the patron saints dearest to Catholic piety. 
It will suffice to instance St. Louis, who has become the figure of 
Christian royalty ; St. Joseph, who honors laborious poverty ; St. 





? See the last chapter of the Life of Saint Elisabeth, by Montalembert. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 405 


John the Baptist, typifying innocence, and St. Mary Magdalen, 
repentance; painting and music glorified under the names of St. 
Luke and’St. Cecilia; St. Catherine chosen to personify philoso- 
phy. It was certainly a graceful thought which for this ministry 
gave to a virgin martyr the preference over so many illustrious 
doctors. It would seem as if there must have been an intention 
of softening the asperity of the scholasties, of abasing their pride, 
and of confirming their faith, when they were given for their pa- 
troness a young girl of Alexandria, who had confounded the 
learning of the pagan sophists, and who, after defending the Gos- 
pel in the Museum, had confessed it under the torments of mar- 
tyrdom. 

Thus, in theology, each thing has its objective value and its rep- 
resentive value; everything is positive, and everything is figur- 
ative ; realities and ideas meet at all points, and this relationship 


constitutes symbolism.) It is easy to see what help the arts 








1 Thence, in our opinion, results the unlawfulness of two historical meth- 
ods, one opposed to the other, and either one followed by numerous 
partisans. The first, attaching itself to the literal sense of books and the 
commemorative character of monuments, refuses to see in these any ul. 
terior signification ; its adherents argue from the reality against the sym- 
bol: the Evhemerists of all ages haye thus reasoned. The second fastens 
upon the poetic side of traditions, {he moral scope of works of art; it in. 
terprets astronomical myths and religious dogmas as contained in the 
narrations of the ancient world; but in return it denies to them their posi- 
tive yalue as actual facts: those who adopt this method argue from the 


400 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


inust derive from such relationship. In truth, the fate of the arts 
depends entirely on the problem indicated above. If they aban- 
don themselves to the pursuit of an ideal model which has no ex- 
istence here below, they degenerate into mathematical processes, 
into superstitious rules, the application of which can produce 
nothing but delusive beauties. If they give themselves up to 
mere imitation of actual objects, they will lose their way amid the 
disorder infecting nature, they will justify its deformities by 
whimsical theories, of which the result will be the rehabilitation 
of ugliness. They must learn to recognize the eternal types of 
the beautiful amid the living multitude of creatures, and recom- 
pose, according to its imperfect imprints, the characters of the 
divine seal: they must make mind apparent under the veil of 
matter, and thought illumine the creation of the artist. Christian 
symbolism reveals to the arts the secret of such a result; it does 


more; it furnishes them with admirable subjects whereon to ex- 





symbol against the reality ; such is, for example, the entire polemical sys- 
tem of Strauss as against Christianity. Now both these methods begin 
with a vicious circle, since the two eleraents whose incompatibility they 
assume, to wit, the ideal and the real, on the contrary, form by their union 
the essence of true symbolism. The robust intelligence of the men of 
yore readily admitted the presence of two conceptions under one and the 
same sign. Our analytic habits of thought scarcely allow us fully to grasp 
either one—like the degenerate heroes described in the Iliad, who could 
no longer lift, without great effort, even the half part of the heayy rocks 
which had been as playthings to their fathers. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 407 


ercise their powers. In the early days of the Christian era, paint- 
ing, called in to console the sadness of the catacombs, borrows 
from the sacred Scriptures, and reproduces with pious prodigality, 
figures of resignation and of hope. Noah in the ark, on the 
surging waters, signifies faith sure of its future amid the bloody 
deluge of persecutions ; Job, on the dunghill, preaches patience ; 
Daniel among the lions, is the man of desires overcoming by 
prayer the powers of evil; Elias, borne upward in the fiery char- 
iot, foreshadows the triumph of the martyrs. The multiplying of 
the loaves, the Samaritan woman at the well, the healing of the 
paralytic and the blind, foretoken the propagation of the sacred 
word, the healing of the Gentiles, the moral and intellectual re- 
generation of the world.!' Eleven hundred years later, when the 
Church celebrates her triumph in the places where of old she 
wept her captivity, the arts, reassembled in Rome, execute the 
monumental decorations which there seem to keep endless festi- 
val. Then, in the palace of the successors of St. Peter, Raphael 
designs a series of wonderful pictures which in a few pages con- 
tain the grand thesis of the papacy, a thesis so long in debate, 
then triumphant, but soon again to be delivered over by Luther 
to new disputes. The Deliverance of the Prince of the Apostles, the 


Punishment of Heliodorus, Leo the Great staying the progress of the 





1 See Bosio, d’Agincourt, and Cours @hiéroglyphique chrétienne, by M. 
Cyprien Robert, in the Université Catholique, vol. vii., page 198. 


408 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Huns, the Miracle of Bolsena, are so many magnificent chapters, 
wherein are set forth the divine mission of the sovereign pontifi- 
cate, the sacredness of its character, the invincible power of its 
action, the infallibility of its most mysterious teachings. We see 
all the sciences and all the arts called into its service in the ad- 
mirable confronting of the School of Athens with the Disputa of 
the Blessed Sacrament, of Justinian with Gregory IX. Every 
abstract idea made use of is shown under real forms: philosophy 
is figured by its noblest disciples, jurisprudence by the most fa- 
mous legislators, theology by its confessors and its Fathers :—stay 
a moment, I ought to say that theology is seen there also depicted 
under the lineaments of a woman. But that woman, easily rec- 
ognizable by the garb she wears, is the same whom we find ap- 
pearing in the vision of Dante; she is Beatrice.! 

2. The vision of Dante (referred to in the Vita Nuova), wheth- 
er it really occupied one of his weary nights, or whether it was 
merely the result of his poetical invention, doubtless unveiled to 
him strange wonders, since he felt a certain pity for his earlier 
songs, and announced as about to appear, imaginings unexampled 
before his day. And yet, he had more than once represented 
Beatrice amid the glories of Paradise: it is indeed a pleasant and 


casy illusion to figure a triumph in heaven in honor of those 





‘ In the Stanze of Raphael, frequent allusions to contemporary events 
are discoverable; but they are by no means out of keeping with the deeper 
meanings we have indicated. 


In the Thirteenth Century. " 409 


whose loss we are mourning on earth. Poets especially have 
never been chary in awarding divine honors; in olden days, they 
consecrated the locks of Berenice, and since then they have can- 
onized many a memory not above suspicion. It was then alto- 
gether necessary that in this latest apparition the fair Florentine 
should appear embellished with new attributes distinguishing her 
from the ordinary crowd of saintly women : for her, the usual palm 
and crown were not enough; she was to obtain an exalted rank 
in the hierarchy of the elect, an ample share in the empire grant- 
ed to them over terrestrial things We have seeu that the piety of 
the Middle Ages took pleasure in selecting the most graceful fig- 
ures to fill the most austere roles; we know what parts were as- 
signed to Benjamin and St. Catherine. Dante was no stranger to 
this tendency of his times, if we may be permitted to judge from 
some passages in the Convito (ii., 2, 13), where he comments 
upon the Canzone: “ Ye who comprehending move the third 
heaven.” In the literal sense, he naively confesses that after the 
death of his well-beloved, the daily sight of his tears seemed to 
touch a young neighbor, whose compassion was not devoid of charm 
for him, perhaps indeed, not devoid of peril. In the allegorical 
sense, it was philosophy which alone consoled the bereavement 
of his youth. And he fancied (he said) philosophy made in theim- 
age of a noble lady with a compassionate countenance; luminous 


demonstrations were her looks, and the persuasion accompanying 


410 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


discourse, an enchanting smile (iii, 15). Tfthen his imagination, 
certainly very accommodating, had gone so far as to confound the 
loftiest of human sciences with the beautiful unknown who had 
filled but a fleeting and subaltern place in his thoughts, what _re- 
mained for her who always occupied “ the citadel of his soul”? 
What was left to reach his end except to liken her to the divine 
science? Sundry circumstances, each one heightening the 
other, tended to give color to this association of ideas. With a 
little superstition (and what is more superstitious than love ?), it 
was easy to find many mysteries in the personality of Beatrice. 
First there was the mystery of numbers. Dante met her at the 
age of nine years, sang her praises at the age of eighteen, and lost 
her at the age of twenty-seven; as the difference between their 
ages amounted to but,a few months, this fact bore a double sig- 
nificance. The number nine was everywhere to be met with; and, 
if need were, a little collusion could be employed to aid the coin- 
cidence.! 

But nine is the square of three, and three is the number of 
the Divine Persons. The destiny over which that number 


presided seemed a peculiar manifestation of the Holy Trinity. 





1 Thus, in the Sirvente containing the sixty names, to which allusion 
was made above, that of Beatrice was placed the ninth. Thus also, the 
month of June, in which she died, was the ninth month in the Judaic 


year.—See the New Life, passim. 


In the Thirteenth Century. All 


Then there was the mystery of the name, an important considera- 
tion of that epoch, and one which hagiographers rarely neglected. 
Beatrice signifies, ‘‘ she who gives happiness.” Now, the sover- 
eign happiness, vainly sought by all the schools of antique wisdom, 
is found only by the light of the holy teaching which came down 
after the lapse of four thousand years to regeuerate the earth. 
And finally, there was the mystery of the ascendency obtained 
without effort over the mind and heart of the poet, over his stud- 
iesand his moral nature. She was for him an image of religion, 
which is at the same time heat and light, purifying as well as il- 
iuminating. The beneficent influence of Beatrice so happily felt 
by himself and believed by him to have affected all those among 
whom she lived, was now consecrated by death, and seemed as if 
it must still continue to be exercised, but upon a wider circle, thus 
being transformed into a veritable patronage. It is hence easy to 
conceive how, taking seriously the analogies we have just pointed 
out, he had made of the mystical daughter of Portinari the pa- 
troness, and consequently, the figure, of Theology. 

These suppositions are verified, and the wonderful vision seems 
to be set forth, in the last five cantos of the Purgatorio. There 
is unfolded a scene already described by us, of which we shall 
here recall only the main features. Following the twenty-four 
Ancients of the Old Testament, and surrounded by the four 


Evangelists, represented by the four animals, a Griffon, the em- 


412 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


blem of Christ, draws the car of the Church: the remaining writ- 
ers of the New Testament follow, and the seven Virtues complete 
the procession, On the car, a lady appears; she names her- 
self: she is indeed Beatrice; the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, 
which she calls to mind; the same who once wore lineaments 
so fair, and who so early changed them for an ideal, incor- 
ruptible beauty.! But may we not discover in her something 
still higher, when we see her girt with the olive branch of 
wisdom, wearing the white veil of Faith, the green mantle of 
Hope, the flaming tunie of Charity; when in her eyes the two 
forms of the Griffon are, each in turn, reflected; when the Car- 
dinal Virtues are given her as forerunners, and the Theological 
Virtues alone give permission to contemplate her face to face ; 
when finally, the inspired Ancients sing her praises, and one of 
them salutes her three times with these words: Veni sponsa de 
Libano? Doubtless, there can be little temerity in recognizing 
under these signs the science which teaches men to love, to trust. 
to believe: and whose doctrines all lead back to the idea of Christ, 
considered by turns in either one of His two natures. Ere she 


descended from heaven, the natural virtues had prepared the 





1 Purgatorio, xxx., 25. ‘‘In sooth, I’m Beatrice.””W—Ibid., 39. “* Such 
d this man become in his new life, ete.” May we not here suspect an 
ntion of connecting the Divine Comedy with the little work wherein 


.o- cerm of the great poem was first deposited ? 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 413 


way for her; the supernatural virtues which she brought down 
with her, accompany her and lend their aid in the comprehension 
of the doctrines which she teaches. She it is who unveils the 
meaning of the scriptures of the Prophets and Apostles; she 
also who, according to Dante’s interpretation, is the mystical 
bride of Solomon.!' The sacred drama then continues: the pro- 
cession divides; the damoze! remains alone to guard the ear suc- 
cessively menanced by the eagle, the fox, and the dragon: she 
puts to flight the second of these allegorical enemies. She has 
become a participant in the history of the Church, the guardian 
of tradition, victorious over error. The young Florentine disap- 
pears under a role which can be no other than that of Theology. 
The reality is transtigured into the symbol.” 

Here, undeniably, we find something that no previous poet had 


eyer dreamed of, something that Dante himself had not foreseen 





1 Conyito, ii., 15. ‘Of this one (the divine science) Solomon says: 
“There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and young 
maidens without number: one is my dove, my perfect one.’ He calls all 
the sciences queens and concubines, and young maidens, but this one he 
calls a dove, because she is without blemish of variance ; this one he calls 
perfect, because she makes that truth to be perfectly seen in which cur 
soul finds rest.” 

° This interpretation is also that of M. Villemain, Cowrsde littérature 


tableau de la littérature au moyen age, pages 378, 382. 


414 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


in his first transports ; this probably is the apparition, the secret 
of which he kept to himself for several years, until he was ready 
to unfold it, adorned with every poetical charm, to the amaze- 
ment of posterity. Viewing the subject from another point, if 
we consider the place which this singular scene holds in the 
poem, we find that it occupies very nearly the centre, and there 
fills a space far-greater than that accorded to the most interesting 
episodes, those for instance of Francesea or of Ugolino, of St. 
Dominic, St. Francis, or Cacciaguida: this may seem to be a 
minute observation, but it is one not without value when we are 
considering a work so learnedly constructed, so strictly propor- 
tioned. There seems to be the apogee, so to speak, of the chief 
role. The blessed damozel triumphant in Purgatory, divined from 
afar off, amid the horrors of Hell, is to a certain degree effaced 
amid the ultimate glories of Paradise. Virgil stands in her 
stead at the beginning of the journey; and at its close, St. Ber- 
nard takes her place. It is in the intermediary halt that she 
gleams with a lustre unborrowed and unshaded, that she avow- 
edly sits a queen, that she receives the respectful homage of all, 
and that the most imposing figures of Christianity are gathered 
together at her feet. The apotheosis of Beatrice then seems to 


be the primal theme of the Divine Comedy.! 





1 We think we have already amply shown that in the course of the poem 
Beatrice continues to sustain her symbolic character: she goes on dogma- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 415 


Thus wag this magnificent work subjected to the law which 
weighs upon every human production; it was brought forth in 
sorrow, to grow up in the sweat of the brow. The first inspira- 
tion, undoubtedly, came from love. But, as under the lineaments 
dear to him the Christian poet recognized the reflection of the 
creative thought; as for him, far more than for Plato, the Beau- 
tiful was the Splendor of the True, so did he blend in one and 
the same veneration, so was he to blend in a common glorifica- 
tion, Love and Science. Later on when (his lot having cast him 
into the midst of civil conflicts) he devoted his life to the service 
of the ideal Good, and beheld that sacred ideal outraged and dis- 
torted by the perversity of factions, he set to work to make rep- 
aration to it by the power of words, and, in the epos of Love and 
of Science, he allotted a place to Justice. These three great 
lights of the moral world, Justice, Science, and Love, illumine 
the three divisions of the poem; they form, as it were, the triple 
aureole which Dante purposed placing on the head of his well- 


beloved. An obscure child of the banks of the Arno, scarcely 





tizing through all the spheres of Paradise; in the very beginning of the 
Inferno Virgil had addressed to her these siguificant words: ‘* Thou, by 
whose aid the human race penetrates beyond sublunary things.’’ She is 
also called *‘ the praise of God, the light interposed between the intellect 
and the truth.’’ Are these attributes pertaining to a young woman of 


twenty six? 


410 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


known to the denizens of her own city, so soon forgotten in her 
early grave, he had promised to make her for ever famous. He 
fulfilled his vow, and, if the epistle written by him on her decease 
to all the princes of the time failed to reach its address, the Di- 
vine Comedy has gone much farther; the name of Beatrice has 
penetrated to every spot where the soft Italian tongue is not un- 
known, and it will be repeated in every age still retaining the in- 
heritance of Christian literature. In presence of this miraculous 
power of genius, which confers at will life and immortality, we 
are lost in admiration, and we ask ourselves: If Art can thus 
crown its chosen ones, what will not God do for His elect ? 

3. We have now to offer some explanations regarding two 
other personages, who at the beginning of the Inferno intervene 
in the action of the poem, then vanish to re-appear, but always 
seem to elude the investigations of commentators. Beatrice 
charges Virgil to aid Dante, who has gone astray in the forest. 
She thus speaks. ‘In Heaven there is a noble lady ... whose 
compassion softens the rigor of the divine judgments; she ad- 
dressed herself to Lucia and thus besought her: ‘Thy faithful 
one now stands in need of thee, and unto thee I recommend him.’ 
Lucia, foe of all that is cruel, hastened away, and came unto the 
place where I was sitting with the ancient Rachel. ‘ Beatrice,’ 
said she, ‘the true praise of God, why succorest thou not him who 


loved thee so?’ ... I, after su@h words as these were uttered, 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 417 


came hither downward from my blessed seat, confiding in thy 


” 


discourse. ...” Andagain, Virgil, when encouraging the dismayed 
poet to cross the threshold of the invisible world, says to him: 
‘“Why dost thou delay? Canst thou be wanting in courage and 
contidence when three blessed women are caring for thee in the 
court of Heaven?” } 

Of these blessed women, the third alone is thus far fully known 
to us: we must try to solve whatever mystery may remain, in re- 
gard to the two others. Lucia appears again in the Purgatorio: 
she takes up the sleeping poet, and bears him in her arms to the 
entrance of the ‘“‘dolorous way.” He finds her once more, at the 
end of the journey, in the first circle of the radiant amphitheatre 
of the Empyrean, seated near St. John the Baptist and St. Aune.2 
He certainly intended to depict in her a living figure, a daughter 
of men, like to the other blessed ones whose felicity she shares, 
a saint to whom he doubtless felt grateful for some signal favor 
conferred. Now, Giacopo di Dante, a decisive authority in any 
matter of biography, tells us that his illustrious father professed 
an especial devotion toward St. Lucy, the virgin martyr of Syra- 
cuse.8 Her name is inscribed in the canon of the Massinthe Ro. 


man Liturgy, and she has long been in Italy the recipient of wide- 





1 Inferno, ii., passim. 2 Purgatorio, ix., 17; Paradiso. xxxii., 46. 
3 Giacopo di Dante, MS. Commentary: ‘‘ Blessed Lucy, toward whom 
he had a special devotion.” 


418 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


spread veneration; churches under her invocation were found in 
all the large cities; her feast-day was kept, and her name contin- 
ued popular, until somewhat echpsed in later times by newer 
names rendered by recent memories more prominent or more be- 
loved. Repeated miracles attested the efticacy of licr prayers: one 
of the most renowned took place at Verona, in 1308, the era at 
which many fix the sojourn of the Florentine exile in that city. 
But his devotion had still other motives in the pious beliefs of, and 
even in the mistakes made by, his contemporaries. The heroic 
action of another Christian woman was attributed to St. Lucey ; 
namely, that when closely pressed by the evil desires of a Ro- 
man magistrate, she tore out her eyes and sent them in a golden 
cup to her persecutor: she was usually represented as holding 
the vessel containing the eyes thus sacrificed. Now, a touching 
custom led the men of that day, when seeking aid under any es- 
pecial form of misery, to the altars of such martyrs as had most 
meritoriously passed through like afflictions. St. Lucy was thus 
invoked by all suffering from afflictions of the eyes.! As a nat- 
ural consequence, she came to be looked upon as the dispen- 
ser of the spiritual enlightenment that dispels doubts in the under- 
standing and darkness in the conscience. The Golden Legend, 


which dwells with pleasure upon mystical etymologies, does not 








1 Cajetan, Vite SS. Siculorum acta sanctve Lucie Syracusanee marty- 
ris. Baillet, Vie des Saints. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 41g 


permit this one to pass unnoticed: Lucia a luce; Lucia quasi lucis 
via.!_ Dante, whose intelligence so ardently aspired to the eternal 
lights of truth, and whose eye-sight (injured by close application 
in reading and by the tears shed after the death of his well-be- 
loved) had suffered from a long and dangerous impairment,” had two 
reasons for placing confidence in the intercession of the fee 
who illumines. He knelt before her effigies with the theologian 
of the cloister and the blind man of the wayside. His prayer 
answered, he hung up his votive offering, not in any obscure 
chapel, but in the poetical edifice raised by his own genius. 
There now only remains to make known her whom Lucy her- 
self obeys, and to whom alone belongs the initiative of the mir- 
aculous pilgrimage. We cannot here join in the general opinion 
of commentators, who see in her simply the Divine Clemency or 
Prevenient Grace: an allegory based upon no real personality 
could searcely properly be bound together with two actual, his- 
torical personages. We even expect to find the unknown re-ap 
pearing, as do her two companions during or toward the close of 
the Paradiso: thus much is required by the symmetrical ordering 
of the narration. But who is in Heaven the noble lady whom it 
is not necessary to name, whose intercession softens the decrees of 


the immutable Judge, whose commands make Lucy and Beatrice 





1 Jacob. de Voragine, Leyenda aurea, de vita sanctze Lucix. 
2 Convito, iii., 9.—The New Life ; near the end. 


420 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


rise from their places? Who should it be, if not she who was 
called Our Lady in the ancient tongue of Christian nations? It 
is indeed she, the Blessed Virgin, whom the poet descries seated 
us x queen, occupying the first place in that assemblage of the 
orified; he behoids the angels showering upon her all the joys 
‘ernity: in her august countenance he contemplates, more 
ious than ever, the divine resemblance: to her he addresses 
Le sublime prayer with which his last canto begins. He makes 
uo secret of his devotion toward her whom he invokes morning 
and evening: 


The name of the fair flower I e’er invoke 
Morning and evening.! 


He desires this beloved figure to be found at the beginning and 
at the end of his poem, as it was found on the threshold and at 
the summit of all religious edifices during the Middle Ages. 

We can the better comprehend the poetic part assigned to the 
Mother of our Lord, when we find her several times alluded to in 
the Vita Nuova as the object of the pious love of Beatrice, as the 
model of her virtues and her especial patroness. Mary was for 


her what Lucy was for Dante.? He himself, in a philosophical 





1 Paradiso, xxiii., 30. 

2 The New Life. Thus, one of the most interesting scenes related in the 
book takes place in a church where the praises of the Blessed Virgin are 
being sung. Also, we find the name of Mary profoundly venerated by 
Beatrice, and the young saint finally placed by the side of her protectress, 
““in the Heaven of humility.” 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 421 


fragment until now little noticed, would seem to have done away 
with the last remaining doubts in this regard. He undertakes to 
explain the annual revolution of the sun; and, in order to give to 
his hypotheses a more readily comprehended form, he imagines at 
the poles of the terrestrial globe, two cities, whose inhabitants 
become spectators of the supposed phenomena. But, instead of 
indicating these two points by an algebraic sign, as would be done 
by astronomers at the present day, he gives the name of Mara to 
the city situated at the north pole, beneath the star that never 
sets, and that of Lucia to the city placed at the south pole. Then, 
by the construction of the disquisition, Mary, in three pages, is 
mentioned nine times (always the mystic number), while Lucy is 


named only six times.! 





1 Convito, iii.,5. ‘* Thenimagining, the better to understand, that in the 
place of which I spake there is a city, and its name is Maria,... let us im- 
agine another city, named Lucia, ete..’—Dante has sung the Blessed Vir- 
gin in a sonnet, which we cannot refrain from quoting here, as one of 
the most beautiful tributes proffered by men to the Mother of God 
(Lyell’s Tr., except the first word) : 

Mother of virtue, light eternal, thou, 
Of whom was born the meek benignant Fruit 
That suffered on the cross a bitter death, 
To save us sinners from the dark abyss : 

Thou, queen of heaven, and of this world, supreme, 
Vouchsafe to entreat thy ever-worthy Son 
To bring me to His heavenly kingdom’s joys, 
By virtue of His never-failing grace. 

Thou knowest my hope was ever placed in thee; 
Thou knowest in thee was ever my delight : 


A422 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


These favorite names thus interwoven in the web of the discourse, 
as two ciphers in a monogram, plainly enough betray the intention 
dictating their use in this manner. This is one of those charming 
puerilities which so greatly please us when we find them in great 
men; a distraction of the heart amid the labor of thought. It is 
at the same time an ingenious modesty, which, not venturing to 
employ together the names of the two clients, makes use, in their 
stead, of the names of their sainted patronesses. Finally, it is a re- 
ligious care to place his chaste affection of this nether world un- 
der the safeguard, under the responsibility, so to speak, of the two 
heavenly virgins. We here find amid the very thorns of scholas- 
tic erudition, a flower of most delicate sensibility blooming in the 
light of faith. Here is indeed a revelation of Dante’s character, 
the explanation of the personality of Beatrice, the secret of the 
poem. For we now understand why, in the second canto of the 
Inferno, that first conversation is held between Mary and Lucy, in 
consequence of which the well-beloved Beatrice descends to aid 
the poet, and on which depends the entire action of the poem, 


with all its lessons and its beauties. 








O goodness infinite, support me now ; 
Help me, for at the bourn I am arrived 

Which I must soon inevitably pass ; 

O now, chief comforter, forsake me not: 
For every fault committed here on earth 

My soul deplores, and contrite is my heart. 


J1i.—Dante’s First Studies in Philosophy. 
How HE WAS LED TO THE EXAMINATION OF MORAL AND POLITICAL 
QUESTIONS.—HIS RESPECT FOR THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE. 
XTRACTS FROM THE CONVITO ii, 13; iv., 1, 6.1—COoNJEC- 


TURES IN REGARD TO THE PERIOD OF DANTE’s JOURNEY TO 





PaRiIs.—RESEARCHES OF M. VICTOR LE CLERC CONCERNING 
SIGER DE BRABANT.—CONCLUSIONS, IN AID OF THE INTER- 
PRETATION OF THE POEM. 
If 
66 fy, HEN she was lost to me who was th efirst joy of my 
WwW soul, | remained pierced with so pungent a grief 
that no sort of solace seemed to touch my malady. Yet, after 
the lapse of some time, my reason, which sought to heal the 


wound, bethought itself (since my own efforts and those of others 





1 We regret that we cannot here offer still more ample extracts, and 
thus make that fine work, the Conyito, better known. Bouterweck com- 
pares it to the most excellent philosophical treatises of antiquity (Ge- 
schichte der Schanen Wisserschaften, vol. I., p. 61). At least we have 


endeavored to preserve the simple and familiar form of the style. 


4m 


424 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


had not availed to soothe me) of having recourse to the means by 
which sundry mourners lad found consolation. I began to read 
in that book by Boethius, unknown to many, in which he charmed 
away the sorrows of his downfall and captivity. Then, having 
heard that Cicero had written a book on Friendship, wherein he 
related how Lelius was consoled for the death of his friend Scipio, 
I applied myself to the reading of that book. Although it was at 
first difficult for me to enter into the thought of these writers, I 
finally penetrated into its meaning so far as my knowledge of the 
art of grammar and some degree of intelligence on my part would 
permit—the said intelligence giving me to see, as in a dream, 
many truths, as may be observed in the Vita Nuova. Now, as 
it sometimes happens that a man looking for silver, contrary to 
his expectation finds gold, which some unknown cause has placed in 
his way, not perhaps without design on the part of the Divine Will, 
so, I seeking consolation, found not only a remedy for my tears, 
but names of authors, terms of science, and titles of books, which 
led me to think that Philosophy, the sovereign inspirer of such 
authors, sciences, and books, must be something very great. I 
imagined her formed as a noble lady, to whom I could not but as- 
cribe a sweet and pitying countenance, so that my ravished sen- 
ses could scarcely detach themselves from herimage. From that 
moment I began to frequent the places where she showed herself, 


namely, the schools of religious orders and the assemblies of those 


In the Thirteenth Century. 425 


who philosophize, so that, at the end of a short space of time, 
abont thirty months, I felt myself so touched by the sweetness 
of her conversation, that my love for her excluded every other 
thought. .... For this lady of my mind was the daughter of God, 
queen of all things, most noble and most beautiful; she was 
philosophy. ...” 

2. “ Love, according to the unanimous opinion of the wise men 
who have discoursed thereupon, and according to the daily teach- 


ings of experience, has, as its essential effect, the power of bring- 
ing together, of uniting, the person who loves and the person 


loved; whence it comes that Pythagoras said: ‘ In friendship, 
of more than one, one is made.’ And, as two things united to- 
gether naturally communicate to each other their several quali- 
ties, so that one may become entirely like the other, the passions 
of the person loved may pass into the heart of the person loy- 
ing ..., so that this latter cannot help loving the friends and hating 
the enemies of the former. This is why a Greek proverb says: 
‘ Among friends all things are in common.’ Having thus become 
the friend of the noble lady whom I have mentioned, I began to 
measure out my aversions and my affections according to her 
hatred and her love; like her, I began to love the disciples of 
truth and to hate the followers of error. But everything is in 
itself deserving of love, and nothing merits hatred except in so 


far as some evilis mingled with it. Itis then reasonable and 


426 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


just to hate, not things, but the evil which is in them, and to try 
to free them from such evil. | Now, if anyone in the world exer- 
cises this wonderful art of freeing things from the evil that ren- 
ders them hateful, it is, above all, my most excellent lady, since 
in her are to be found, as in their source, all reason and all jus- 
tice. Desirous then of imitating her in her works as well as in her 
sentiments, I decried, I anathematized to the extent of my power, 
public errors; not in order to dishonor those who professed them, 
but in the hope of making them detest, and consequently of mak- 
ing them banish from their minds, the defects rendering them 
obnoxious to me. Among such errors, I more especially pursued 
one, dangerous and fatal, not only to its sectaries, but also to its 
adversaries. This was the error relating to the nature of nobil- 
ity. It had become so firmly rooted by custom and by lack of 
reflection that the general opinion regarding nobility remained al- 
most entirely perverted. From that perverted opinion false 
judgments arose, and from the said false judgments issued unjust 
respect and unjust disdain; so that the good were held in con- 
tempt and the wicked in honor, whence resulted the worst con- 
fusion in the world, as may readily be imagined. Meantime it 
happened that the sweet countenance of my noble lady became 
somewhat obscured to me, and did not aflow me to read clearly 
in her eyes that which I sought to know, namely, whether God 


had created, by a formal act of will, the first matter of the ele- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 427 


ments. In consequence of this, I for some time suspended my 
assiduities in her service, and, in the absence of her accustomed 
favors, I occupied my leisure in meditating on the general error 
which I had come to perceive ... The lady alluded to is the same 
one mentioned in the previous chapter, to wit, Philosophy, that 
potent light, under favor of whose rays the germ of nobility de- 
posited in the heart of man develops, blossoms, and fructifies. 

3. “Authority is a character which inspires faith and com- 
mands obedience. Now, that Aristotle is supremely worthy 
of obedience and of credence, may be demonstrated as follows. 
Workmen and artisans in various occupations which all concur in 
the intent of some principal art, ought to obey and believe in him 
who exercises that art, in him who alone knows the end common 
to all their labors. Thus to the knight ought to be subservient 
those whose callings are intended for the service of knighthood, 
those who forge swords and bucklers, and the makers of saddles 
and bridles. And, as all the works of man suppose a last end, to 
attain which is the destiny of human nature, the master whose 
business it was to lay down and to make us acquainted with that 
end, may, with good reason, claim to be believed in and obeyed. 

“That master is Aristotle. ... To understand how Aristotle really 
came to know in what way to lead human reason to the discovery 
of the last end of man, we must not forget that from the oldest 


times the researches of the wisest men were directed to this aim. 


428 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


But, as men are many, and the appetites from which none are ex- 
empt vary with every individual, it was difficult to determine the 
point where all the appetites pertaining to humanity could find 
legitimate satisfaction. There were, in days long gone by, an- 
cient philosophers, the first of whom was Zeno, ! who thought that 
the end of human life was to be found in rigid uprightness, 
which consisted in following strictly and without any external 
considerations the way of truth and justice, in giving utterance 
to no pain and to no pleasure, in rendering oneself impassible. 
And they defined uprightness, thus conceived, ‘ that which, in the 
sight of reason, is evidently praiseworthy in itself, without any 
consideration of interest or of profit.’ Those belonging to this 
school were called Stoics, and of their number was the glorious 
Cato, whom I scarcely dare to name. There were others who 
saw and believed differently, of whom the first was a philosopher 
named Epicurus. This latter considered that each animal, from 
the instant of his birth, when it is still under the immediate im- 
pulsion of nature, shuns pain and seeks pleasure. He concludes 
from this that the last end to which we tend is enjoyment, that 
is, pleasure without any mixture of pain. And, admitting no in- 
termediate condition between pain and pleasure, he defines enjoy- 
ment, the absence of pain. His reasoning is reported by Cicero 


in the first book de Finibus bonorum. Among the disciples of 





' Dante seems to have confounded Zeno of Citium with Zeno of Elza. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 429 


Epicurus, called after him Epicureans, we must count Torquatus, 
a noble Roman, descended from the celebrated Torquatus, judge 
of his own son. There were finally others, who had for their 
head Socrates, and then Plato, his successor; and these, being 
endowed with more penetration, discovered that in all our 
actions, we may err, and in fact that we do commonly err, either 
by exaggeration or by insufficiency. Consequently. they decided 
that the exercise of human activity, in a mean freely chosen be- 
tween excess and deficiency, between the too much and the too 
little, is precisely the supreme end in question; they defined 
the Sovereign Good, ‘activity within the limits of virtue.’ 
These were called Academicians: Plato. and Speusippus his 
nephew, bore this title, borrowed from the place where Plato pur- 
sued his meditations. Socrates did not leave them his name, be- 
cause he had laid down no body of doctrines. But Aristotle, the 
Stagyrite, whom nature had endowed with a genius almost divine, 
and Xenocrates of Chalcedon, who shared in his labors, having 
recognized the true end of man very much according to the views 
held by Socrates and the Academy, gave to ethics a more regular 


form, and reduced it to its most perfect expression !... And be- 





1 This singular estimate which represents Aristotle as the continuer of 
Plato, justifies the views set forth in Chap. II., Part III. Itis by no 
means irreconcilable with the letter written by Marsilius Ficinus, referred 


to in that connection, and from which we cannot deny ourselves the 


430 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


cause Aristotle argued while he walked up and down, he and his 
companions were called Peripatetics. As Aristotle gave the final 
touch to ethies, the name of Academician fell out of use, and 
that of Peripatetic designated the entire school which at the pres- 
ent time holds the intellectual government of the world; so that 
the opinions maintained by it may, in a certain sense, be called 
Catholic. Hence we may see that Aristotle was the man who 
directed the eyes and the steps of the human race toward the end 
to which it ought to tend; and this is the proposition we wished 


to demonstrate.” 





pleasure of quoting a few lines: *‘ Dante Alighieri, celestial, as to coun- 
try ; a Florentine, by his place of residence; by race, angelic ; and by pro- 
fession, a poet-philosopher ; although he did not converse with that re- 
vered father of philosophers and interpreter of the truth, in the Greek 
tongue, he nevertheless spoke in the spirit of Plato and in the same man- 
ner, adorning his book with many Platonic sentences. And by such great 
adornments he conferred so great honor upon the city of Florence, that 
one might as truly say, the Florence of Dante, as, Dante of Florence. We 
find three realms described in our most correct leader, Plato; one of the 
beatifled, one of the wretcbed, and one of wanderers. He calls those be- 
atifled, who are in the city of life, restored, reéstablished ; wretched, they 
who are forever shut out of that city; and pilgrims or wanderers, they 
who are outside of that city but not condemned to eternal exile. In this 
third order, he places all the living, and such among the dead as are des- 
tined to temporal purgation. This Platonic order was first followed by 
Virgil ; the same was, later on, followed by Dante, who drank with the 


cup of Virgil at the springs of Plato.’’—See Appendix, No. 3. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 431 


Il. 


The passages just quoted make clear to us the first steps of 
Dante in the philosophical studies into which he was to penetrate 
so deeply. We here see his earliest teachers, Cicero and Boethi- 
us; the monastic schools, that is, the schools in the monasteries 
of Santa Croce and of San Marco, of the Franciscans and the 
Dominicans, whose beneficent rivalry revived instruction through- 
out Christendom; and finally, the ‘‘assemblies of those who 
philosophize,” in which I think I recognize those solemn disputa- 
tions so passionately loved by the Middle Ages. I find these at 
an early day at Florence, when, in 1063, the people, under the 
guidance of the monks of Vallombrosa, rose against the bishop and 
the Nicolaites ;! when in 1115, the Epicureans, as Villani relates, 
became numerous enough to constitute a formidable faction. It 
was the controversies in matters of religion that had completed, 
if I may be allowed thus to express myself, the political education 
of the Italian cities which dictated conditions to emperors, and 
whose podesias set their plebeian signatures to the treaty of 
Constance. 

It seems that these lights sufficed to satisfy the curiosity of 


Dante, and that he did not leave Florence during the thirty 





1 Voigt, Life of Gregory VII. 


432 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


months following the death of Beatrice,! that is, not until the end 
of the year 1294. Starting from this date, we lose track of him, 
and do not recover it until 1299, when, on the eighth of May, we 
find him charged with the conduct of a negotiation between the 
commune of Florence and that of San-Geminiano.2 About the 
same time we find his name inscribed in the books of the corps 
of physicians and apothecaries, one of the six arts called to the 
election of the six priors of the city. In this space of tive years 
must be placed his marriage, sundry of the embassies ascribed to 
him by Filelfo, the studies that Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imo- 
la represent him as pursuing at the universities of Bologna and 
Padua: to these must perhaps be added his journey to Paris. 
This latter question still stands in need of elucidation. It is cer- 
tainly not uninteresting to know what sights were offered to the 
poet’s view when he visited the great schools of France. 
Witnesses worthy of credence put off this journey to the period 


of Dante’s exile. Here are the words of Boccaccio: + ‘ When 





1 (The* thirty months ’? mentioned are, according to some of the later 
commentators, to be reckoned from the date of the first acquaintance 
with philosophy, and not from the date of Beatrice’s death).—T'r. 

* Pelli Memorie, p. 94. 

3 Idem, ibid., p. 90. The register has inscribed on it these words: 
‘** Dante d’Aldighiero degli Aldighieri, poeta florentino.” 


1 Boceaccio, Life of Dante.—Cf. Genealog. deorwm, xiv., 2. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 433 


he beheld every way closed against hope of return, he abandoned, 
not only Tuscany, but Italy; crossing the Alps, he went, as best 
he might, to Paris. There he gave himself up to the study of 
theology and philosophy. He often entered the schools and 
maintained propositions in all the sciences against those who 
wished to argue with him.... One day when he was maintaining 
a thesis de quolibet in a school of theology, several learned men 
proposed to him fourteen questions on different subjects, with the 
arguments for and against: he, without taking any time to reflect, 
repeated them in the same order in which they had been laid 
down: then, keeping on in the same sequence, he resolved them 
skilfully, and replied to the arguments on the opposite side; the 
which was regarded by all present as almost a miracle.” Ben- 
venuto da Imola and Villani indicate the same period,’ but with- 
out entering into the above details, which show memories care- 
fully preserved. But the reminiscences of Boccaccio are not al- 
ways without flaw. Born in 1313, he was the recipient of a 
tradition already somewhat antiquated, and fables find their way 
into his narrative: the birth and the death of the poet are therein 
encompassed by apparitions and dreams. We see the beginning 
of that cirelet of popular legends so often woven for the crown- 


ing of great names. 








1 Benvenuto, apud Muratori, Antiquit. Ital., i., 1036.—Villani, apud 
Muratori, Scriptores, xiii., 508. 


434 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


I find a first motive for doubt in the contrary assertion of John 
of Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, one of the first commentators of 
the fifteenth century, which assertion takes Dane in his earlier 
years to Padua, Bologna, Oxford, and Paris.’ ‘ He was a bache- 
lor in the University of Paris, where he read in publie the Book 
of Sentences, to fulfil the conditions of mastership: according to 
custom, he replied to all the doctors, and went through all the 
acts required to obtain a doctorate in theology. Nothing re- 
mained undone except the act of installation (inceptio sew con- 
ventus). But he lacked the requisite funds, and hence he re- 
turned to Florence (without the doctorate, but) an adept in the 
arts, and a perfect theologian. He was of a noble family, skil- 
ful in affairs; he was made a prior of the Florentine people, so 
that he became absorbed in the functions of public office, forgot 
the School, and never went back to Paris.” This text is easily 
reconcilable with the testimony of Filelfo, who, writing at Flor- 
euce where he had access to documents lost to us, relates that 


Dante visited Paris in the capacity of ambassador from the Flor- 





1 Apud Tiraboschi, from the year 1800 to 1400, lib. iii., c. ii.: ‘* Diu 
studuit tam in Oxoniis in regno Anglise, quam Parisiis in regno Francie ; 
et fuit Bachalarius in universitate Parisiensi, in qua legit sententias pro 
forma magisterii, legit Biblia, respondit omnibus doctoribus, ut moris est, 
et fecit omnes actus qui fleri debent ad doctorandum in sacra theologia,”’ 


ete. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 435 


entines, consequently, previous to his banishment, and that he 
pleased the king by the agreeability of his conversation.! This is 
sufficient, not indeed to refute Boccaccio, but to present another 
view of the facts, and at least to prove the uncertainty of the 
tradition relating to this matter, One point remains undeniable, 
and thatis, the fact of the journey to France, for which I can 
again appeal to the authority of the commentary by Giacopo di 
Dante. When explaining the lines in the ninth canto of the In- 
ferno relating to the famous tombs at Arles, he states that his 
father had seen them.? But the ¢téme when is not specified, and 
hence there is a free field for arguments of another kind. 

If we consider the implacable resentment against France pro 
fessed by Dante from the day of his exile, a resentment which 
appears throughout the poem whenever occasion offers, we can 
scareely believe that he would at that very time have visited a 
people so detested by him, that he could have desired to behold the 


capital of the Capetian princes who had become the persecutors 





1 Pelli, Memorie, 93. 
2 Inferno, ix., 38. 
** Even as at Arles... 
The sepulchres make all the place uneven. 
“The author in this part speaks of having seen many tombs of the dead. 
He introduces a similitude, that, as in acity named Arles, etc. ...” 


Manuscript Commentary by Giacopo di Dante, Royal Library, No. 7765. 


436 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


of himself and the oppressors of his country. How could that 
close observer, whom nothing escaped, have frequented the Uni- 
versity of Paris in 1308, without finding it filled with the renown 
of Duns Scotus, who died that same year, and who is not once 
mentioned either in the Divine Comedy or inthe Convito? I can 
find in these works no trace of the philosophical revolt, the noisy 
protest of the Franciscan school against the triumph of St. Thom- 
as Aquinas and the Preaching Friars. On the contrary, in the 
tenth canto of the Paradiso, we see St. Thomas in possession of 
an uncontested empire: he is among the saints what Aristotle is 
among the philosophers, the Master of those who know. It is. he 
who sets the ranks in order, who resolves difficult questions. 
We recognize the sovereign authority which the writings of the 
Angelic Doctor kept in the school until the close of the thirteenth 
century. As an instance, we need only adduce Godfrey des 
Fontaines, who, in 1289, examined if one could censure the opin- 
ions of St. Thomas without committing mortal’sin.! Among the 
contemporaries of St. Thomas, I find named only St. Bonaventura, 
as approaching but not equalling him. Among those who suc- 
ceeded him, the poet names but one: “That is the eternal light 
of Siger, who, reading lectures in the Street of Straw, did syllo- 


eize invidious verities.” * Such precise particulars, so lively an 


1 Quétif and Echard, Scriptores ordinis preedicatorum, vol. i. 

2 Paradiso, x. 46. 

Sigieri ought regularly to be rendered in French by Siger as Ruggieri 
by Roger. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 437 


admiration for a man whose renown was soon dimmed in France 
and never passed beyond the Alps, to my mind undoubtedly point 
out the doctor at whose feet Dante himself had sat. And as he 
meets in heaven only persons dead before the year 1300, the date 
assigned by him to his vision, we are permitted to conclude that 
the poet visited Paris in the interval between 1294 and 1299. 
We may thus explain the period of disorder in his father’s life 
which Giacopo di Dante places before his thirty-fifth year, that 
is, before the year 1300.1 During that stormy season of life, at 
so great a distance from Florence and from the memorials of 
Beatrice, I can understand the errors of the poet thus borne along 
amid the noisy crowd frequenting the schools of Paris. aro 
sanctificantur qui multum peregrinantur—Rarely are they sancti- 
fied who travel much. 
GDL. 

We must now seek to convey some idea of the instruction 
which left such enduring memories in Dante’s mind. And here 
come in the admirable researches of M. Victor Le Clerc in regard 
to Siger of Brabant. While awaiting their publication, accom- 
panied by their full proofs, in the one and twentieth volume of 
the Literary History of France, M. Le Clerc has had the kindness 


to send me the notes I am about to quote. May I here be 





———— oe ee 
1 See the notes to the following section. 


438 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


permitted to thank him for allowing me to use them in my work 
which he has thus enriched, to thank him also in behalf of the 
poet’s friends, who will henceforth be spared many doubts and 
misconceptions touching this matter. 

We find in the anonymous treatise de Recuperatione terre sanc- 
tw (Ap. Bongars, t. ii., p. 316-361), written about the year 1306, 
the eulogium of an excellent doctor in philosophy, Siger de Bra- 
bant (precellentissimus doctor philosophie magister Sigerius de 
Brabantia), whom the author had listened to in his youth. In 
another place, in a plan for study drawn up for the use of the 
young people whom he wishes to call to the conquest of the 
Holy Land, he recommends the Questiones naturales extracted 
from the writings of Brother Thomas, of Siger, and of some other 
doctors.!. Again, and previous to the year 1300, we find a legacy 
of sundry parts of the works of St. Thomas bequeathed to poor 
masters in theology of the house of Sorbonne, by Siger, then dean 
of the collegiate church of Courtray.? Finally, the historians of 
the order of St. Dominic are acquainted with a Siger of Brabant, 


called up (in 1278) for the offence of heresy before the tribunal 








1 Item expediret quod quzestiones naturales haberent extractas de scrip- 
tis tam fratris Thome quam Segeri et aliorum doctorum.—Bongars, t. I1., 
p. 337. . 


2 Quétif and Echard, Scriptores ordinis preedic., vol. i., p. 295. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 439 


of the Dominican, Simon du Val, and acquitted.! The name Bra- 
bant then covered much more territory than it covers at the 
present time: Courtray might have been included in it without 
any considerable lack of geographical exactitude, a quality, be it 
said, somewhat rare among the writers of that time. We may 
here recognize the Siger of the Paradiso, the same person called 
by sundry commentators, Siger of Brabant (Brabante and some- 
times Bramante’, who appears in company with St. Thomas 
Aquinas, and thus, so to speak, under the responsibility of that 
glorious champion of orthodoxy, and who indeed requires such 
patronage to cover the suspicions aroused by the boldness of his 
public teaching: ‘ Reading in the Street of Straw.” 

But to unearth the biography of Siger was not enough; M. Le 
Clere was also to discover his works. Among the manuscripts 
of the old Sorbonne foundation, sundry fragments have been pre- 
served of the Qucestiones naturales, and of several treatises on 
dialectics, bearing the name of Siger, the whole crowned by a 
book in which clearly appears the character of the mind so rashly 


judged by his contemporaries. The book bears the name of Jm- 





1 Quétif and Echard, vol. i., p. 395. The Ottimo commento thus speaks : 
“This is master Sigier, who composed and read Logic in Paris, and held 
the chair many years in the Street of Straw, which isa place in Paris 
where Logic is read....and he says that he read invidious verities because 
he read the elenchuses.’’ We are then concerned witha doctor who 
read and who composed, one by turns a professor and an author. 


440 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


possibilia, and opens with these words: “The doctors of the 
School of Paris being assembled together, a dialectician proposed 
to prove, and to defend before them, several impossible theses, of 
which the first was this: That God does not exist.” Then fol- 
low other propositions not less scandalous, supported by appro- 
priate arguments. Here we see the characteristics of the inde- 
fatigable logician; enamored of controversy, and defying the 
School to the combat of syllogisms, szlogizzo. 

After the writings of Siger, nothing remained to be discovered 
except his legend; M. le Clere found this in sundry manuscript 
commentaries on the Divine Comedy. The first one contains the 
following narrative. ‘The poet says that St: Thomas pointed 
out to him also the soul of Siger of Brabant, who was a man ex- 
celling in all sorts of sciences; he was an infidel, and a doctor at 
Paris. Now this adventure happened to him; one of his pupils 
who had died appeared to him one night in a vision, and showed 
him how he was suffering great torments. Among other pangs, 
he made Siger hold out his hand, and he then let fall into it a 
drop of his sweat; that drop made him experience so sharp a 
pain that he awoke; in consequence of this, Siger abandoned 


study, had himself baptized, became the saintly friend of God, 





1 Convocatis sapientibus studii Parisiensis, proposuit sophista quidam 
impossibilia multa probare et defendere. Quorum primum fuit, Deum 
non esse. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 441 


and thenceforth strove to lead the opinions of philosophers back 
to the holy Catholic faith.” Another commentary adds that the 
disciple appeared all covered over with sophisms. The Latin 
glosses say co-opertus sophismatibus, or cum cappa plena cedulis. 
Some. texts give only the first words of the narrative, and sud- 
denly break off as if the occurrence was one well known to their 
readers. We in fact find the same tale before the time of Siger, 
in the authors quoted by Duboulay (Hist. de [Univ. de Paris, 
année 1172); in Vincent of Beauvais (Speculum historiale, lib. xxv., 
e. 89). It has passed into the Golden Legend as having taken 
place on All Souls’ Day. The confusion is explained by the sus- 
picion surrounding the doctrine of Siger, which had led to his 
appearance before the tribunal of the inquisitor. These are again 
the ill-received truths of which the poet speaks: ‘“ Jnvidiosi veri.” 
Vis 

These biographical studies lead to important conclusions. When 
Dante was about to begin his immortal work, he had already 
passed through the course of instruction given at the Paris Uni- 
versity (in the laborious fashion of the students of the thirteenth 
century, seated on straw, at the feet of the masters), and hence 
through the dialectic schools and the noisy disputes of the rue 
du Fouarre. Thence he carried over into his poetry all the modes 
of contemporary learning, and consequently the method of al- 


legorical interpretation, applied not only to the Sacred Scriptures, 


442 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy. 


but to the texts of Virgil or Ovid. Moreoyer, he was full of the 
teaching of St. Thomas, which he had found in all the glory of a 
new reign. How could his great soul, captivated and deeply im- 
pressed by these doctrines, not have felt the need of inculcating 
them by casting them in a form of his own invention, and thus 
handing them over to the men of his day that they might be pre- 
served to future ages? Hence we are entitled to seek in the 
Divine Comedy all that the poet could have put into it,—philoso- 
phy as its foundation, allegory as its form, and labor in its every 
part. At the same time, we may once more have learned the 
lesson, opposed to the prejudices of many, that science never 


kills inspiration, and that discipline does not stifle genius. 


(Father Bowden, in his translation of Dr. Hettinger’s com- 
mentary on the Divine Comedy, says that Siger was “ Sigebert, a 
monk of the Abbey of Gemblours. His chief work, the Chronica, 
is intended to justify from history, the Ghibelline claims.” 
Whether this person is, or is not, the same as that unearthed by 


M. le Clere, the present writer cannot say.—Z7.) 


DOCUMENTS 


In Elucidation of the History of Philosophy 
in the Thirteenth Century. 





I, Bull of Innocent IV. for the Revival of 
Philosophical Studies. 


<7 NNOCENT, Bishop, servant of the servants of God, to all the 
ih prelates of the kingdoms of France, England, Scotland, 
Wales, Spain, and Hungary, health and apostolic benediction. 

A deplorable rumor is current, and passing from mouth to 
mouth has come to afflict our ears. It is said that the greater 
number of aspirants to the priesthood, abandoning, nay, disdain- 
ing philosophical studies, and consequently the lectures on the- 
ology, frequent only schools where the civil law is explained. 
It is added, and this it is that more especially calls down the 
rigors of divine justice, that in many countries the bishops re- 
serve the prebends, ecclesiastical honors and dignities, for those 
who fill chairs of jurisprudence or who can lay claim to the title 
of advocate; whereas these qualities, if not covered by others, 
ought rather to be regarded as motives for exclusion. The 
nurslings of philosophy, so tenderly gathered to her bosom, so 


1 Duboulay, Histoire de Vv Université de Paris, year 1254. 
443 


A444 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


assiduously nourished with her doctrines, so well fashioned by 
her care to the duties of life, languish in a misery which al- 
lows to them neither their daily bread nor the covering of their 
nakedness, and this obliges them to shun the eyes of men and 
seek darkness, like birds of night. And meanwhile, our men 
of the Church (become men of the Law), mounted on fine steeds, 
clad in purple, covered with precious stones, with gold, and with 
silk, their raiment reflecting the rays of the scandalized sun, 
parade everywhere the spectacle of their pride, exhibiting in 
their persons, not the vicars of Christ, but the heirs of Lucifer, 
and thus provoking the anger of the people, not only against 
themselves, but also against the sacred authority of which they 
are the unworthy representatives ... Sara is then a slave, and 
Agar has become mistress.! 

We have desired to find a remedy for this uncustomary disor- 
der. We have wished to lead minds back to the teachings of 
theology, the science of salvation; or at least to philosophical 
studies, which do riot indeed yield the sweet emotions of piety, 
but in which are to be found the first glimmerings -ef eternal 
truth, whereby also the soul is freed from the wretched preoccu- 


pations of cupidity, root of all evils and like unto the worship of 





- 
! This eloquent invective calls to mind, and perhaps excuses, the severe 


words of Dante in regard to the abuses and scandals of his day. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 445 


idols. Wherefore, we decide by these presents that henceforth 
no professor of jurisprudence, no lawyer, whatever may be the 
rank or the renown enjoyed by him in the faculty of the law, 
can lay claim to prebends, to ecclesiastical honors and dignities, 
nor even to inferior benefices, if he has not given the requisite 
proofs of capacity in the faculty of arts, and if he is not recom- 
mended by the innocence of his life and the purity of his mor- 
als ... In case that any prelates through blameworthy presump- 
tion, should allow themselves in any way to contravene this sal- 
utary order, by the fact itself, and with full right, they shall be 
deprived for that time of the power of conferring the vacant 
benefice ; a repetition of the offence may be punished with the 
spiritual divorce, which we shall pronounce against the prevari- 
eator by depriving him of his prelature. 


Given at Rome, in the year of the Incarnation 1254. 





II. General Classification of Human Knowledge.— St. 
Bonaventura, ‘de Reductione artiumad Theologiam.” ! 
“ Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down 
from the Father of lights.” 
Thus speaks the Apostle, St. James; and these words, which 


point out the source of all intellectual illumination, enable us_ to 





1 The fragment we are about to give is also found in the Précis d’his- 
toire de la Philosophie, issued by the Directors of Juilly. But the limits 
of their work necessitated numerous omissions, and we haye endeayored 
to furnish a more complete translation. The encyclopedic efforts of St. 


446 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


foresee that the light emanating from so fruitful a source must 
be multiple. For, admitting that every illumination is accom- 
plished in us in the same manner, that is, by the internal percev- 
tion of the true, we nevertheless can distinguish an exterior light 
which illumines the mechanical arts; an inferior light which is 
reflected in the knowledge acquired by the senses; an interior 
light, that of philosophic thought; and a superior light, that of 
Grace and of the Holy Scriptures. The first enables us to grasp 
artificial forms ; the second, to apprehend the natural forms of 
matter; the third reveals to us intelligible truths; the fourth, 
the truths pertaining to salvation. 

1. The light of the mechanic arts illumines the artificial opera- 
tions by which we, in some sort, go out from ourselves to satisfy 
the exigencies of the body ; and as these are servile labors, de- 
rogatory, foreign to the speculative functions of thought, the 
light proper to them may be called exterior. It is divided into 
seven rays, which correspond to the seven arts recognized by 
Hugh of St. Victor, namely: weaving, working in wood, stone, 
and metals, agriculture, hunting, navigation, theatrics, and med- 


icine. The correctness of this classification may be demonstrated 





Bonaventura, preceded by those of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor, and 
imitated ‘y Vincent of Beauvais, Brunetto, etc., attest the breadth of those 
minds so greatly calumniated: they anticipated Bacon of Verulam by 


more than three centuries. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 447 


as follows: All the mechanical arts have for purpose either the 
solace of our ills, which may be procured by excluding sadness 
or want; or the multiplication of our goods, that is, of all that 
can serve or please us, according to these lines from Horace: 


Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetz.. . 
Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci. .. 


The solace and the pleasing of the mind form the object of 
theatrics; it may be defined, “the art of play.” It comprises 
all exercises capable of furnishing recreation: singing, instru- 
mental music, dramatic fictions, and gesticulation. The goods 
which serve to satisfy the material wants of men exact different 
kinds of labor, according as the requirement is to cover, to feed 
them, or to complete these two good things by accessory means. 
Tf our object be to cover or to shelter ourselves, we may use pli- 
able and light materials, and the management of such pertains to 
Weaving; or again we may require durable and solid materials, 
and this will be the art of those who work in metal, in stone, or 
in wood. If we seek to procure food, there are aiso two ways of 
providing it: nourishment may be obtained either from vegetables 
or from animals; the first belong to the domain of Agriculture, 
the second pertain to the Chase. Moreover, it may be said that 
Agriculture is mainly restricted to the production of alimentary 
substances, and that the functions of the Chase extend to every 


sort of preparation which these substances may undergo, not ex- 


448 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


cepting the care of the oven, the kitchen, and the cellar. Here 
one of the parts of the art gives its name to the other portions, 
in virtue of its pre-eminence over all, and its relations with each 
one. And finally, if we turn our attention to the accessory 
means that are required to ensure and to prolong the well-being 
thus brought about, we may see that it is needful sometimes to 
supply a deficiency of resources, and sometimes to turn aside the 
danger of hindrances. The first of these functions is that of 
Navigation, under which we may include the divers species of 
Commerce, all destined to furnish food and clothing. The other 
pertains to Medicine, whether it have for its special end the 
preparation and administering of electuaries, balsams, and potions, 
or devote itself to the treatment of wounds, taking the name of 
Surgery. We have then reason to conclude that the classification 
of the seven arts is legitimate. 

2. The light of the senses permits us to apprehend the natural 
forms of matter ;- we call it inferior, because the knowledge ac- 
quired through the senses comes from below, and is obtained only 
under favor of corporeal light. Now, it is susceptible of five dif- 
ferent modifications, corresponding to the division of the five 
senses; the five senses in turn form a complete system; this 
may be proved by the following argument, borrowed from St. 
Augustine. The elemental light which enables us to distinguish 


visible things may remain in all the purity of its essence, and 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 449 


then it is the principle of sight; when it unites with the air, it 
becomes the principle of hearing; laden with vapors, it is the 
cause of smell; impregnated with moisture, taste results; it en- 
ters into combination with the element of earth, and thence pro- 
ceeds touch. For the sensitive spirit is also of a luminous nature; 
it dwells in the nerves, of which the texture is transparent; it is 
thickened in the organs of the senses, where by degrees it loses 
its native limpidity. As then simple bodies are five in number, 
that is to say, the four elements, and the fifth essence, mau has 
been provided with the five senses which are related to them, 
that it may be possible for him to perceive all the forms of bodies. 
In fact, there can be no perception unless there be a correlation, 
a concurrence between the organ and the object, to call forth the 
sensation proper to them.! Other proofs exist whence we may 
also conclude that the five senses constitute a complete system ; 
but those that we have just adduced unite in their favor the au- 
thority of St. Augustine and the suffrage of reason; they exhibit 
the whole perfection of human sensibility, by showing the exact 
correspondence of the divers conditions on which it depends, 
namely: the organ, the object, and the medium by which these 
are placed in communication. 

3. The light of philosophic thought leads us to the discovery of 


1 These ideas, beneath their antique form, offer singular analogies with 
sundry bold guesses of modern science. 


450 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


intelligible truths; it is called interior, because it is devoted to 
the search for hidden things, aud, moreover, results from the gen- 
eral principles and primary notions which nature has placed 
within the human mind. This light is distributed between tle 
three divisions of philosophy, which are: rational philosophy. 
natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. The correctness of 
this tri-partition may be demonstrated in several ways. Firstly, 
truth may be considered either in discourse, in things, or in mor- 
als. Now, the kind of study called by us rational, seeks to main- 
tain truth in discourse ; that called natural, endeavors to lay hold 
on the truth in things; moral philosophy, or ethics, applies itself 
to the task of making truth reign in behavior. Secondly, as the 
Divinity may be successively contemplated as the efficient, the 
formal, and the exemplar cause, that is, as the principle of being, 
the reason of the mode of being, the type and rule of action: so, 
to the interior illumination of thought, are revealed the origins of 
all existences, hnd this is the object of Physics; the economy of 
the human mind, and this is the object of Logic; *the conduet of 
“life, and this is the object of Ethics. Finally, the light of philos- 
ophy enlightens the understanding in its three functions: in so 
much as it governs the will, and this is the philosophy of duty ; 
in so much as it directs its own self and takes note of that which 
is without, and this is the philosophy of nature; in so much as it 


makes words serve its purposes, and then it may be ealled the 


In the Thirteenth Century. A51 


philosophy of language: so that man possesses truth under the 
triple form of practical application, formulated science, and trans- 
missible instruction. The services of words may be employed in 
three ways: in making known conceptions, in determining con- 
victions, and in arousing passions ; consequently, the philosophy 
of language is divided into three parts: grammar, logic, and rhet- 
orice; the first of these proposes to express, the second to prove, 
and the third to move. The first considers reason as the appre- 
hensive faculty; the second, as the judicial power; the third, as 
the motive force ; for the three arts relating to the use of words 
are necessarily related to these three offices of reason, which ap- 
prehends through the intermediation of correct speech, which 
judges by the help of exact speech, and which thrills under the 
charm of ornate speech. If the understanding turns to the 
things of the outer world, it is always that it may explain them 
by reducing them to the formal reasons which make them what 
they are.! Now the formal reasons of things may be considered 
either in matter, when we call them seminaZ: or in the abstract 
ideas of the human mind, when we call them ¢ntelligible or in 
the Divine Wisdom, when we call them ideal. This is why the 


philosophy of nature is divided into three branches: Physics, 





1 Translate formal reasons by essential laws, seminal by physical, 
chemical, and physiological, and we find the same abstract ideas under a 


different terminology. 


452 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


properly so called, Mathematics, and Metaphysics. Physics ex- 
amines into the generation and corruption of beings, according to 
the natural forces and seminal reasons existing in them. Mathe- 
matics considers forms which are capable of being abstracted ; it 
combines them among themselves according to intelligible rea- 
sons. Metaphysics, embracing all things, reduces them (following 
the order of ideal reasons) to the one principle from which they 
have proceeded, namely, God, who is Cause, End, and universal 
Type. It matters little that these ideal reasons have been a sub- 
ject of controversy among metaphysicians. Finally, the govern- 
ment of the will may be restricted within the conditions of the 
life of the individual, it may be developed within the circle of the 
family, or extended over the entire multitude of a people to be 
ruled. Consequently, moral philosophy may be subdivided into 
three parts: Monastics, Economics, and Politics. The names of 
these divisions suffice to indicate the three distinct domains that 
form their several appanages. 

4. The light of the Holy Scriptures initiates us into the truths 
pertaining to salvation: if we call that light superior, it is be- 
cause it lifts us to the knowledge of things beyond our natural 
reach; and also because it descends from the Father of lights by 
the way of immediate inspiration, and not by the way of reflection. 
But, even if the light of the Scriptures be one from the literal 


point of view, it is nevertheless tiple from the mystical and spire 


In the Thirteenth Century. 453 


itual point of view. For, all the sacred books contain, in addi- 
tion to the literal sense represented by the words, a threefold 
spiritual sense revealed under the letter, to wit :—the allegorical 
sense, wherein we discover what we must believe, whether of the 
Divinity or of the Humanity; the moral sense, whereby we learn 
in what manner we must live; and the anagogical sense, where- 
by we recognize the laws according to which man may unite him- 
self to God. Thus, all the teaching of the sacred writers relates 
to these three points: the Eternal Generation and the Incarnation 
of the Word, the rules by which to govern life, and the union of 
the soul with God. The first point has to do with faith; the 
second, with virtue; and the third with beatitude, which is the 
end of both the others. The first is the subject of study for doc- 
tors; the second, for preachers; and the third, for contempla- 
tives. The teaching of St. Augustine turns upon the first, that 
of St. Gregory upon the second, and that.of St. Dionysius upon 
the last. St. Anselm followed St. Augustine; St. Bernard was 
the disciple of St. Gregory; Richard of St. Victor preferred St. 
Dionysius: for Anselm gaye himself to discussion, Bernard to 
preaching, and Richard to contemplation. Hugh of St. Victor 
embraced all three of these teachings at the same time, and thus 
became the pupil of all the three masters. 

From the foregoing we may conclude that the light which we 


have regarded as coming from on high by four ways, may be con- 


454 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


sidered under a new aspect, as forming six different irradiations. 
Wemay, in fact, distinguish between the light of the Holy Serip- 
tures, that of the knowledge acquired by means of the senses, 
and that of the mechanie arts; the light of rational philosophy, 
that of natural philosophy, and that of moral philosophy. Thus, 
in this life, there are six appearances of the intellectual light, and 
these are as so many days having their evenings, since every 
science of this nether region will have an end; and to them suc- 
ceeds the seventh day, the day of rest that will have no end, that 
is to say, the illumination of the soul in the glory of heaven. Thus, 
the six transitory illuminations may be compared to the six days 
of creation ; so that the knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures cor- 
responds to the first creation, which was that of physical light ; 
and so on for the others, in the order that has been indicated. 
And, as the five successive creations were related to the first, so 
is all knowledge co-ordinated to that of Holy Writ, is there summed 
up and perfected, and thus advances to its end in the eternal il- 
lumination. Hence, all human sciences ought to converge toward 
the science contained in the Scriptures, especially when the latter 
is interpreted in its highest sense; for it is by this means that 
our lights will return to God, from whom they descended to us. 
Then the circle now begun will be closed, the sacred number will 
be filled up, and the divinely instituted order will be realized by 


the completion of its harmonious proportions. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 455 


III. God. 


Existence and Attributes of God—Unity of Essence, 
Trinity of Persons.—St. Bonaventura, “ Itinerarium 


Mentis ad Deum,” c. v. and vii. 


God manifests Himself in three ways: outside of us, by the 
marks which His creative action has left in the world; within 
us, by His image, which is reflected in the depths of human na_ 
ture ; above us, by the light with which Heillumines the superior 
region of the soul. Those who contemplate Him in the first of 
these manifestations, stop in the vestibule of the tabernacle; 
those who rise to the second have entered into the sanctuary ; 
and those who reach the third have penetrated into the Holy of 
Holies, where rests the ark of the covenant, shadowed by the 
wings of two cherubim. And the two cherubim in turn figure 
the two points of view whence the invisible mysteries of the 
Divinity may be contemplated, namely, the unity of essence and 
the plurality of persons: the first susceptible of being concluded 
from the very idea of Being; and the last, from the very idea of 


Good. ! 





1 This is the way in which the holy doctor, in chapters II. and IV. of the 
same treatise, sums up the principal traits by which God makes Himself 
known, whether in nature or in humanity: ** Material things, considered 


in general, ure subject to three conditions, weight, number, and measure : 


456 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


And first, in considering the unity of essence, we must take 
note that the idea of Being bears with it the incontestable certi. 
tude of its own reality. For Being excludes the presence of not- 
being, as nothingness implies the absolute lack of existence. Aud 
as nothingness in no sense partakes of existence nor of its con- 
ditions, so Being cannot have anything in common with not-being, 
either actually or potentially, either in the order of objective 
truths or in the arbitrary order of our judgments: it is impossible 
to suppose that Being is not. Now nothingness, which implies 
the negation of existence, can only be conceived by means of ex- 
istence; and this latter, on the contrary, cannot be conceived 
otherwise than by means of itself. In fact, everything is con- 
ceived, either as not being, or as being possible or actual. If 


then not-being can only be conceived through Being, and Being 





they exhibit themselves under the threefold aspect of mode, kind, and 
order. In them, finally, we discover substance, force, and action, whence 
we may ascend as by trustworthy footprints to creative Power, Wisdom, 
and Goodness. .. . 

“Enter into your own interior, and see how your soul cannot refrain 
from loving itself with extreme ardor. And yet it would not love itself 
if it did not know itself; it could not know itself if it had no memory of 
itself ; for the intellect grasps only ideas represented by the memory. ... 
There are then in your soul three powers wherein you may bebold reflect- 


ed as in a mirror, the image of the Divinity.” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 457 


in potentiality only through Being in act, Being in act is the first 
idea which enters the mind. But the object of this first idea is 
not particular Being, which is limited in its development, and 
which in this respect remains in a state of poleaaliy: neither 
is it abstract general Being, which has no veritable reality: it 
must then be the Divine Being. Here we may pause to wonder at 
the blindness of the intellect, which fails to perceive the Absolute 
Being, even when it knows Him before all other things, and with- 
out Him could have known none of them: like to the eye, which, 
agreeably taken by the shades of colors, seems not to see the 
light by which it has been enabled to discern them. ... 

If, then, Absolute Being can be perceived only by means of it- 
self, it does not emanate from any other. It is the first of all. 
If it excludes nothingness, touching upon it in no point, it has 
neither beginning nor end; it is eternal. If it includes within it- 
self no other element than Being, it is without composition, that 
is to say, entirely simple. It has not the character of inert power, 
because inert power in a certain manner partakes of nothingness : 
it is then always in action. It admits of no defect, and con- 
sequently supposes supreme perfection. And as it contains no 
principle of divisibility, we can say that it is absolutely one. 
Thus, the Absolute Being is at once the first of all, eternal, 
entirely simple, always in action, supremely perfect, and of in- 


divisible unity. And these divers attributes are so certain that 


458 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


we cannot even suppose privation of them, and. moreover, each 
one of them is necessarily bound to those which precede and those 
which follow; so that the intelligence, when contemplating them, 
feels as though environed by light from heaven. But now comes 
that which is to complete its amazement and fairly ravish it. 
This is, that the Absolute Being appears to it as also the last of 
all, as supremely present, as infinite, immutable, immense, uni- 
versal. It is the last because it is the first: for the first of Be- 
ings must necessarily have created for Himself all the others; 
He has become their end, as He was their beginning ; Alpha be- 
comes Omega. He never ceases to be present, because He is 
eternal. In fact, the Eternal cannot be enclosed within the 
limits of time; He cannot occupy successively the divers intervals 
of duration: for Him then there is neither past nor future, but a 
continual present. He is infinite because He is simple. In fact, 
where the essence is most simple, there also is the force the most 
intense; and the more intense the force, the more does its energy. 
approach the infinite. He is immutable, because He is always in 
action: Being in action is nothing other than Pure or Absolute 
Act; now, Absolute Act can acquire nothing new, ean lose noth- 
ing of that which is in it: consequently it can undergo no change, 
it is immutable. He is immense, because He is perfect; if He is 
perfect, we can conceive nothing in which He does not excel; 


excellency in magnitude is what we name immensity. He is uni- 


In the Thirteenth Century. 459 


versal because He is one: for Unity is the primal element of ail 
multiplicity. Such Unity is the cause, efficient, exemplar, fina, of 
all things: the Being of whom we speak is then universal, not as 
the essence of all that exists, but as the principle, the sufficient 
reason, the beneficent author of all essences. 

It is time to pass on to the second consideration, the trinity of 
persons, which must be concluded from the very idea of good, 
The Absolute Being is infinitely good, since He is perfect, and 
hence nothing could be better. And, reciprocally, we cannot sup- 
pose that the infinitely good Being does not exist, since it is bet- 
ter to exist than not to exist. Now, we cannot contemplate Him 
in the plenitude of His existence without coming to perceive that 
He is triuneas He isone. The Supreme Good must in fact be su- 
premely communicative. But there could be on His part no su- 
preme communication if He did not communicate His entire sub- 
stance to Him into whom He flows over. The communication 
must be substantial and personal, actual and interior, natural and 
voluntary, free and necessary, incessant and complete. Such, 
however, is not that which is accomplished in creation: for it is 
enclosed in time and in space, which are no more than a point in 
presence of the illimitable and ever-during Goodness. There 
must then be from all eternity, in the very bosom of the Sovereign 
Good, a production, consubstantial, as is that operated by way of 


generation and procession: whence results the equality of the 


400 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


persons produced. The Eternal Principle, eternally acting, be- 
gets a Principle equal to Himself, and from these Two proceeds a 
Third; aud these Three are the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Spirit. This is uecessary to the realization of that entire pouring 
forth of Himself, an essential perfection without which the 
Sovereign Good would not exist. Thus, in the contemplation 
of the Supreme Goodness, which is endless Act, the limitless ex- 
pansion of a love at once voluntary and necessary—in the very 
idea of that Good essentially communicative, are found the prem- 


ises whence we may elicit the dogma of the Trinity.1 


IV. Man. 


I, Nature of the Soul.—St. Bonaventura, 
“ Breviloquium.”’ 


The teaching of theology in this regard may be summed up 


eo, in- 


in a few words. The soul of man is a form, existing, living, 





1! In this fragment, which is not given as a demonstration, but as a justi- 
fication of the Christian dogma, the holy doctor sums up, but without de- 
veloping them, the proofs scattered through the writings of the Fathers. 
We must not then be surprised that he does not show why the divine 
communication stops with the Holy Spirit. Theologians adduce several 
reasons for this, one of which is, that Power, Intelligence, and Love, con- 
stitute in their triplicity the entire essence of spirits : so that nothing can 


be added to them, as nothing can be taken away. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 401 


telligent, and free. Existing, not by itself, nor as an emanation 
from the infinite essence, but by the divine operation, which from 
nothingness made it pass into being ;—Living, not with a mortal 
life borrowed from the exterior world, but with a life proper to 
itself and haying no end;—Intelligent, for it conceives created 
things, and the Creator Himself, whose image it bears;—Free, 
that is, exempt from constraint in the exercise of its reason and 
its will. ... 

We come now to the philosophical development of these dog- 
mas, The First Principle, who is sovereignly happy and good, 
desires through His goodness to communicate His happiness to 
all creatures; not to those alone whom He has made spiritual and 
nearest to Himself. but also to those that are sunk in the lowest 
depths of matter. Now, He acts upon these lower creatures by 
means of intermediaries which connect them with the higher: 
He has laid down for Himself this general order of things. He 
has then rendered capable of happiness, not only the pure spirits 
forming the angelic choirs, but likewise spirit united to matier, 
that is to say, the soul of man. And, as the possession of happi- 
ness is glorious only when it comes as a recompense, since rec- 
ompense presupposes merit, and as merit could not exist with- 
out liberty of action, there has been given to the soul a liberty 
which no constraint can destroy. In fact, the will cannot be 


violated by aggressions from without, although by reason of the 


462 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


Fall it has become weak and prone io sin. If the soul is eapable 
of felicity, it is capable of possessing God. The soul must lay 
hold on Him by the faenlties at its disposal, and first by the in- 
tellect, which, after liaving conceived the infinite, will readily 
comprehend finite things. It is characteristic of true felicity 
that it cannot be lost: consequently, it can be bestowed only 
upon incorruptible natures. That which is happy is immortal : 
the soul must then live an endless life. Finally, since it derives 
its felicity from a cause external to itself, and yet is immortal, it 
is dependent and variable in its mode of being, while remaining 
incorruptible in its being. Jt follows that it exists neither by 
itself, nor as an emanation from the divine essence, for then it 
would be unchangeable; nor by the action of the secondary 
causes of the exterior world, for then it would be corruptible. 
It is, then, through the creative operation that it has receivéd 
existence. ... Thus felicity, considered as the supreme end of 
the soul, requires in it the combination of all the attributes com- 
prised in the definition proposed above. ‘To still farther explain 
the first term, which may perhaps appear obscure, we must say 
that the soul endowed with immortality may be separated from 
the perishable body which it inhabits; that if it is called a form, 
it is by no means an abstract conception, but a distinct reality ; 
and that it is united to the body not merely as the essence to the 


substance, but as the motor to the thing moved. 


In the Thirteenth Century 463 


II. Of the Faculties of the Soul in General.—St. Bona- 
ventura, Ibidem. 

The soul, in its union with the body, constitutes the whole 
man: it makes him exist; it also makes him live, feel, and under- 
stand. We may consequently recognize in it a threefold power, 
vegetative, sensitive, intellectual. By its vegetative power, it 
presides over generation, nutrition, and growth. By its sensi- 
tive power, it grasps that which is sensible, retains that which it 
has grasped, combines what it has retained. It grasps by means 
of the five exterior senses, which correspond to the five elements 
of the material world; it retains by means of the memory; it 
combines and divides by means of the imagination, in which is 
found the power of combining impressions received. By its in- 
tellectual power, it discerns the true, repels the evil, and tends to 
the good. It discerns the true by the rational instinet; it repels 
evil by the irascible instinet; it tends to the good by the con- 
cupiscible instinct. 

But discernment supposes knowledge; aversion and appetite 
are affections: the soul will then be by turns knowing and affective. 
Now the true may be considered from two points of view, either 
as true or as good. The true and the good are eternal or transi- 
tory : hence the faculty of knowing, which we name intellect or 
reason, may be subdivided into speculative and practical intellect, 


into inferior and superior reason. These names indicate rather 


404 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


different functions than distinct powers. The affections may be 
inclined in the same direction in two different manners: bya nat- 
ural movement, or by a deliberate choice. This is why the fac- 
ulty of willing is divided into natural will and a_ will of choice. 
And, as free choice results from a deliberation in which discern- 
ment is exercised, it follows that free will is the common work of 
the reason and the will; so that it unites in itself all the intel- 
lectual forces of man. St. Augustine has said the same: ‘ When 
we speak of free will, it is not a part of the soul which we so des- 


ignate, but indeed the soul entire.” 


III. Memory, Intellect, and Will, Considered in Their 
Especial Functions.—St. Bonaventura, “ Itinerar- 


” 


ium Mentis ad Deum,” cap. iii. 

T. The office of memory is to retain, that when needed they 
may be re-presented, not only ideas of actual, corporeal, perish- 
able things, but also those of things successive, simple, eternal. 
To begin with, memory keeps for us the recollections of the past, 
the conceptions of the present, and the previsions of the future. 
Further, in it are found the most indecomposable ideas, such as 
the elements of discrete and continuous quantities, unity, the 
point, the moment, without which it would be impossible to call 
to mind numbers, space, and duration, which are composed of 


these. Finally, it preserves invariable the unvarying axioms of 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 405 


the sciences: for these we cannot so far forget, except in case of 
insanity, that on hearing them propounded, we would not imme- 
diately assent, as to truths recognized, familiar, and, so to speak, 
natural. We experience this when asked to pronounce upon a 
proposition such as : The whole of anything is greater than a 
part of the same. Now, in the first place, as memory embraces 
the past, the present, and the future, it bears the image of eter- 
nity, which contains all times in an indivisible present. In the 
second place, since it contains indecomposable ideas, we must con- 
clude that it is not modified solely by the material impressions re- 
ceived from the exterior world; but that it has within itself sim- 
ple forms which have been impressed upon it, from on high, which 
could not enter by the gates of the senses, uor take on sensible 
features. Thirdly, from its fidelity in retaining axioms, it results 
that it is aided by a light which does not waver, and which al- 
ways makes it see unvarying truths under an unchanging aspect. ... 

II. The function of intellect is to comprehend isolated terms, 
propositions, reasonings. The intellect comprehends the mean- 
ing of terms when it knows their respective definitions. Now, the 
definition of each term is to be made by another term more gen- 
eral, which in turn will be defined by a third still more extended, 
until we reach those terms which are the broadest of all, and 
without which it would be impossible to define anything. Thus, 


if we were devoid of the general idea of Being, we could not grasp 


406 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the definition of any particular being. ... But Being may be con- 
eeived as defective or perfect, relative or absolute, in potentiality 
or inact, transitory or permanent, dependent or free, secondary 
or primal, simple or compound. ... And, as defects are negative 
terms perceivable only by help of the corresponding positive 
terms, the intellect could not analyze the idea of any created being, 
defective, relative, compound, transitory, unless it had the idea of 
a being, complete, absolute, simple, eternal, in whom are con- 
tained the reasons of things. ... The intellect comprehends prop- 
ositions, then, especially when if recognizes them as certainly 
true, that is, when it knows that it cannot err in adhering to 
them. This infallibility supposes that the truth cannot be other- 
where, that truth does not change place, that it is immovable. But 
the intellect, itself subject to change, cannot be assured of this 
perfect immutability except by the aid of an unalterable light 
which beams forth unceasingly, and which cannot be a mere 
creature; which consequently must be that light which enlightens 
every man coming into this world, the Divine Word. Finally, 
the intellect is sure that it comprehends a reasoning, when it sees 
the conclusion result necessarily from the premises. Now the 
necessity of the conclusion remains the same, whether the prem- 
ises rest upon facts necessary or contingent, real or merely pos- 
sible. ‘‘ If the man runs, he moves.” The consequence does not 


ceage to be true, even if the man does not run, or if indeed he no 


In the Thirteenth Century. 467 


longer exists. Thus logical necessity does not depend upon the 
real and material existence of things in nature; neither does it 
depend upon their imaginary existence in human thought: but it 
requires their ideal existence in the eternal exemplars according to 
which the Divine Artist labors, and which are reflected in all His 
works. Thus, as St. Augustine says, the torch which illumines 
our reasonings is kindled at the focus of infinite truth, whereto 
its light leads us back. It follows that the intellect is in relation 
with infinite truth; for, without the assistance received from 
that truth, it could obtain no certitude. Hence we are able to 
find the truth which teaches us, if coneupiscences from within, 
and appearances from without, do not interpose themselves be- 
tween our gaze and the August Master, always present in the 
depths of our souls. 

III. The will in its free action passes successively through 
three stages, which are: deliberation, judgment, and desire. 
Deliberation has for its end, to examine which of two objects 
is the better. But, of two objects, one can be called the better, 
only by reason of a greater resemblance to a third which is per- 
fectly good: moreover, resemblance is appreciated by comparison, 
which in turn supposes some knowledge of the objects com- 
pared. ... Hence the will which is deliberating, takes as its start- 
ing point an innate idea of perfect Goodness. Judgment can be 


pronounced only in accordance with alaw. But one cannot confi- 


408 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


dently judge according to the text of a law, if one is not al- 
ready sure of the justice of its provisions: otherwise, it would be 
necessary to suspend judgment, and first judge the law itself. 
Now, the soul is its own judge. Hence the law according to 
which it must judge, and which is not to be judged by it,—that 
law which is in it, is yet distinet from it, and comes to it from on 
high. And as nothing is higher than the soul, if not He whose 
work the soul is, we may conclude that the will, in the moment 
of judging, takes as its point @appui the Divine Law. Finally, 
desire is proportioned to the attraction exercised by the thing de- 
sired. Of all things, that which exerts the most lively attraction is 
felicity; and felicity can be acquired only by the accomplishment 
of our last end, that is, by the possession of the Sovereign Good. 
Desire, then, tends necessarily toward the Sovereign Good, or at 
least toward whatever is related to it by some analogy, toward 


whatever in some features represents it. 


IV. Mutual Relations of the Physical and the Moral.— 
‘Compendium Theologice Veritatis,” lib. II., cap. 
Iviii., liv.! 


The disposition of the parts, the sum total of which constitutes 





1 This work has had the honor of being attributed in turn to the most 
illustrious doctors of tbe School: Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
Thomas Sutton, Hugh of Strasburg (see the Histoire Littéraire de la 
France, t. X1X.). The opinion which holds St. Bonaventura to be its au- 
thor is founded: 1st, on the analogy between the ideas and expressions 
of the Compendium and those of the Breviloquium ; 2d, on the testimony 
of two old manuscripts in the Vatican Library. 


In the Thirteenth Century. 469 


the human body, presents numerous variations, which, skilfully 
interpreted, seem to correspond to the divers dispositions of the 
soul. ... Our masters in this art of interpretation are Aristotle, 
Avicenna, Constantine, Palemon, Loxus, Palemotius. We shall 
follow in their tracks. 

To begin with the complexions, we must perceive that melan- 
choly complexions bear the impress of sadness and gravity; the 
contrary qualities pertain to the sanguine; the bilions show 
themselves inclined to anger; the phlegmatic, to sleepiness and 
sloth. Sex does not fail to exercise a powerful influence: men 
are impetuous in their movements, friendly to intellectual labors, 
and steadfast in presence of danger. Women are timid and 
compassionate. 

The bigness of the head, when disproportioned, is ordinarily 
an indication of stupidity: its extreme smallness betrays want 
of judgment and of memory. A flat head, depressed on the top, 
bespeaks a lack of self-restraint in mind and heart; elongated 
and shaped like a hammer, it has all the marks of foresight and 
cireumspection. A narrow forehead bespeaks an indocile intelli- 
gence and bestial appetites ; too broad, it would indicate but a 
small share of discernment.... If it is square and of good pro- 
portions, it is stamped with the seal of wisdom, perhaps of gen- 
ius. 


Eyes blue and bright express boldness and vigilance; those 


470 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


which seem dull and wavering disclose the habit of strong drink 
and gross pleasures. Those which are. black, without admixture 
of any other shade, point to a weak and ungenerous nature. ... 
Such as are small, red, and protruding, ordinarily accompany a 
body without address and an unbridled tongue. But when the 
glance is piercing, although veiled by a slight humidity, it an- 
nounces veracity in speech, prudence in counsel, promptitude in 
action.... A well-cut mouth, closed by thin lips, the upper 
slightly projecting beyond the lower, expresses noble and cour- 
ageous sentiments. A small mouth, with thin edges pressed to- 
gether to restrain their movement, manifests cunning, the habit- 
ual resource of weakness. Half-open and hanging lips are a 
symptom of inertia and incapacity. This observation may be re- 
peated upon the examination of various animals, 

Short and delicate hands betoken energy and skill. Long, 
hooked fingers denote intemperance at table and in words. 
Men who walk with long strides are almost always endowed with 
a lofty character and indefatigable activity. Those whom we 
see hurrying their steps, bent forward and carrying their heads 
low, wear the certain appearances of avarice, wiliness, and timid- 
ity. 

In general, when all the parts of the body keep their natural 
proportions, and there reigns among them a perfect harmony 


of shape, size, color, position, and movement, it is allowable to 


In the Thirteenth Century. 471 


presume a no less happy disposition of the moral faculties; and 
reciprocally, the disproportion of the members readily permits us 
to suspect a similar disorder in the intellect and the will. We 
might even say with Plato, that our features often wear a resem- 
blance to some animal whose ways are reproduced in our con- 
duct. ... But we must above all remember that these external 
forms do not set the mark of necessity upon the internal characters 
corresponding to them; it is not in their power to destroy the 
liberty of the soul of which they indicate the tendencies. More- 
over, the value of these indications is only conjectural, and some- 
times uncertain, so that in this matter there would be temerity 
in making a precipitate judgment. For the indication may be 
found to be the result of accident; and, even if it be the work 
of nature, the inclination which it répresents may yield to the 
ascendency of a contrary habit, or may correct itself under the 


moderating restraint of reason. 


~V. Society. 


I. Philosophy of the Law.—St. Thomas of Aquin. 


Summa, I* 2”, qq. xc.-cxvii. ‘“‘de Legibus. ”! 
1. Laws CONSIDERED IN THEIR EsseNcE.—Quast. 90. 


Four questions are proposed: 1. Whether Law is a depen- 








1. Only by mutilating it, have we been enabled here to insert this treat- 


ise de Legibus, which in its entirety forms perhaps the finest system of 


472 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


deney of reason?—2, What is the end of Law ?—3. What is its 
origin ?—4, What ought to be its promulgation ? 

1. Law is a rule, a measure set to our actions; it is a motive 
which induces us to act, or which deters us from acting. In 
fact, it is called Law (Lex, ligare) because it binds, obliging us 
to a determination which it renders necessary. Now, the rule 
and measure of human actions is reason, which is also their 
first principle, since it belongs to reason to direct the effort 
toward the end in view; and the consideration of the end to be 
attained is precisely, as Aristotle tells us, the first principle of ac- 
tion. But, in every order of things, that which is principle is 
also rule and measure: thus unity measures numbers; and thus 
the motion of the heavens rules the motion of this nether world. 
We may then conclude that Law is a dependency of reason. 

2. As reason is the principle of human actions, so again in 
reason itself should there be found an idea which will in its turn 
be the principle of our other ideas, and on which the Law will, 
in a more absolute manner, depend. Now, the idea which pre- 
sides over all our operations, which governs and directs all the 
decisions of practical life, is the idea of a last end. But the last 


end of human existence is felicity or happiness. The Law must 





the philosophy of Law ever traced by a Christian hand. The omissions 
will be scrupulously indicated ; they at least invite the reader to recur to 
the unabridged text. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 473 


then tend to realize the conditions of happiness. Again, if the 
imperfect is to be subordinated to the perfect, and the part to the 
whole; if the isolated man is only a part of society, society being 
the perfect whoie, the proper task of the Law will be to realize 
the conditions of the common felicity. And it is precisely in 
this sense that Aristotle, in the fifth book of his ethics, proclaims 
just and commendable all institutions which produce or preserve 
happiness amid political relations. ... Consequently, the gen- 
era: good is the supreme end to which all laws are necessarily co- 
ordinated. 

3. But, while recognizing that the destination of the Law is to 
procure the general good, we must also admit that the care of in- 
suring this destination belongs to the many, or to him who holds 
the place of the many. The laws will thus be the work of the 
whole people, or of the public person charged with the interests 
of the people, for always and everywhere the charge of dispos- 
ing all things with a view to accomplishing the general end, falls 
upon the one who is therein especially, immediately, and entirely 
interested. 

4. As has been said, the Law is imposed by way of a rnle and 
a measure: now, rule and measure are laid down by applying 
them to the objects which are to be subjected to them. Hence, 
to obtain the obligatory force which characterizes it, the Law 


must be applied to those whom it is to govern. But this appli- 


474 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


cation, this first effort of the Law upon minds, is brought about 
by making it known to all by means of promulgation. It follows 
that promulgation is necessary to give force to Law. Thus, from 
the four preceding considerations, we may deduce a satisfactory 
definition, and say finally: The Law is a rational ordinance, tend- 
ing to the common good, emanating from him who is charged 
with the interests of the community, and promulgated by his 
care. } 
2. ON THE DIFFERENT KINDS oF LAWS.—QU-A&sT. 92. 

We shall consider successively: 1. The Eternal Law ;—2. The 
Natural Law ;—3. Human Laws. 

1. Law, as proved above, is the expression of the practical 
reason in the thought of the sovereign who governs a complete 
society. Now, supposing that the world is ruled by the counsels 
of Providence, a proposition whose truth has elsewhere been 
sufficiently established, it is evident that the Divine Reason 
governs the great society of the universe. Consequently, the 


economy of the government of things, such as it exists in Goa, 


a 





1 ‘*Rationis ordinatio ad bonum commune ab eo qui curam communi- 
tatis habet promulgata.”” Ratio, Ordinatio, two weighty words used in 
tbe language of the School to designate tke Law, which words admirably 
set forth its dual character, intellectual and moral. We have kept the 
latter in our modern word ordinance ; the first has been preseryed in the 


Italian ragione. 


Ln the Lhirteenth Century. 475 


the Sovereign of the universe, has truly the character of a law. 
And, as the conceptions of the Divine Reason are not subordi- 
nated to the succession of time, but enjoy an immutable eternity, 
as is written in the Book of Proverbs, it follows that this Law is 
to be called Eternal. 

2. If the Law is rule and measure, it can be viewed from the 
standpoint of him who imposes it, or from the standpoint of 
him who is subject to it ; for a thing cannot be ruled and measured, 
without in some way partaking of the measure and rule. If, 
then, all that is subject to Divine Providence is ruled and measured 
by the eternal law, it is evident that all beings in some manner 
participate in this supreme law ; that is to say, they receive from 
its application a natural impulsion toward the acts which are 
proper to them, toward the ends assigned them. But, among all 
creatures, the rational creature is subjected to Providence in so 
much the more excellent a fashion that it co-operates in the 
work of Providence by providing for itself and for others. It, 
then, is admitted to a more abundant participation in the eternal 
reason, which impresses upon it a continual tendency toward its 
true destiny ; this participation of the rational creature in the 
eternal law is called the Natural Law. 

3. We have often repeated that the Law is the expression of 
the practical reason: now the practical reason and the specula- 


tive reason follow nearly the same path in their developments. 


476 Dante, and Cathohe Philosophy 


Both always descend from principles to conclusions. As, then, 
the speculative reason has some indemonstrable principles natural- 
ly known, and as it draws from them conclusions in the various 
sciences of which the knowledge is not given by nature, but is 
laboriously acquired by study; so, likewise, the precepts of the 
natural law are so many general principles, evident of themselves, 
whence the practical reason is to evolve particular ordinances. 
These ordinances, being the work of the human mind, are to be 
called Human Laws, provided they unite in themselves the 
characters of which the combination constitutes law. This is 
why Cicero, in his work on Rhetoric, sets forth that Law had its 
origin in nature; that later, certain observances determined by 
reason were introduced into custom; and that finally, the in- 
stitutions founded on nature and tested by custom, were sanc- 
tioned by the terror of the laws, and consecrated by religion. 
3. OF THE ETERNAL LAW.—QUA&ST. 93. 

It is asked: Ist. What is the Kternal Law in itself ?—2d. 
Whether all temporal laws must be derived from it? 

1. As the artist bears in his intellect the plan of the works 
which will issue from his hands, so in the intellect of him who 
governs, ought to be laid down in advance the order that he 
will establish in regard to the people entrusted to his care. The 
preconceived plan of works of art is called rule or model , the pre- 


established order of the government of society takes the name of 


In the Thirteenth Century. 477 


Law. ... Now God, the Creator of all things, is to them what, 
the artist is to his works; moreover, He governs, and to some 
extent directs them in all their motions and all their acts. Hence, 
the design of the Divine Wisdom, in so far as it has presided 
over the formation of creatures, takes the name of model, of 
type, or idea; in so far as it determines the striving of beings 
toward the accomplishment of their destiny, it takes the name 
of law ; whence it follows that the Eternal Law is simply the 
order according to which the Divine Wisdom causes all the 
forces of creation to move. 

2. Law is order in movement ; now, in a series of co-ordinated 
movements, the power of the second motor must be derived from 
the power of the first, for the second motor enters on its funec- 
tions only inasmuch as it is itself moved. This is why in every 
hierarchy the economy of the government is transmitted from 
the sovereign power to the secondary powers; and, as in works 
of art, the idea to be realized descends from the artist who 
directs the works to the workmen who execute them, so the or- 
der to be followed in the relations of civil life descends from the 
king to the inferior magistrates. If, then, the Eternal Law is 
the economy of universal government in the thought of God, in 
whom the supreme power resides, it is the source whence all 
systems of government directed by subaltern powers, whence, 
in one word, all human laws, must descend. And this, in fact, 


is the doctrine of St. Augustine, in Book II., de Libero Arbitrio. 


478 : Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


4. OF THE NaturaL Law.—Quast. 94. 

It is asked: Ist. What are the precepts of the Natural Law? 
—2d. Whether this Law is one and the same for all men? 

1. The precepts of the Natural Law have for the practical rea- 
son the same value that indemonstrable axioms have forthe 
speculative reason: this results from the foregoing observations. 

. The first indemonstrable axiom is this: That we cannot at 
one and the same time affirm and deny one and the same proposi- 
tion. This axiom rests upon the notion of Being, the first pre- 
sented to the mind. ... But, as the notion of Being is the first 
which presents itself to the speculative reason, so the notion of 
Good is that which offers itself before all others to the practical 
reason. ... The first precept of the natural law is then this: That 
we must procure good, and avoid evil. And there are as many 
precepts in the law of nature as there are cases in which the 
practical reason spontaneously recognizes the presence of good 
and of evil. ... But if it is the characteristic of good to be the 
natural end of things, reason will recognize this character in ail 
the objects toward which nature inclines us. ... The order of 
these innate inclinations will then determine the order which ob- 
tains among the precepts of the natural law. There is first in 
man an elementary inclination, proceeding from that lower nature 
which he has in common with all creatures. All creatures tend 


to self-preservation ; and consequently, the means necessary to 


In the Thirteenth Century. 479 


preserve life and to keep death at a distance, enter within the 
domain of the natural law. In the second place, man is inclined 
to more complicated actions, the distinctive attribute of that na- 
ture which he shares with the animals; and this is why we 
comprise under the natural law the union of the sexes and the 
education of children. ... Thirdly, man feels himself called to 
another kind of good, corresponding to the superior, intelligent, 
rational nature, possessed by him distinctively. He feels the 
need of knowing God, of living in society; and the natural law 
provides for the satisfaction of these requirements, by stigmatiz- 
ing voluntary ignorance, by recommending an innocent life, in 
fine, by multiplying wise prescriptions which it would take us 
too long here to enumerate. 

2. The natural law sanctions all the primal inclinations of hu- 
man nature; but, among these the one that especially distin- 
guishes and honors us, is the inclination which leads us to take 
reason as the guide of our actions. Now, itis the regular course 
of reason to go from the general to the particular. However, 
while the speculative reason, occupying itself with necessary 
facts, infallibly encounters truth, both in the principles it lays 
down and in the conclusions deduced, the practical reason is bus- 
ied with human actions, which belong among contingent things; 
and, although it still partakes of metaphysical necessity by its 


general maxims, as soon as it descends to the applications, it there 


480 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


finds contingency. Thus, in speculation, the truth is always one 
for all, even though it be not always equally well known. ... In 
practice, justice, of which the general maxims are identical, un- 
changeable, evident for all, may waver and become obscure ir its 
application of them. Hence the natural law, if we stop at its 
principles, is everywhere the same in itself and in the ideas we 
form of it; but if we consider the particular rules which it dic: 
tates according to the diversity of circumstances, it may vary ; 
it may vary first in itself, by yielding to new conditions whicli 
modify its ordinary severity, then also in the ideas conceived of 
it, according as the reason permits itself to be more or less dis- 
turbed by the passions, by perverted habits, or by an untoward 
disposition of the organs. It is easy to cite examples: the law 
which prescribes the restitution of a deposit, undergoes restric- 
tion in case the depositor should reclaim his treasure to make a 
criminal use of it. The Jaw forbidding theft knows no exception, 
but. by certain nations, it has not been recognized: the Germans, 
according to Ceesar, did not regard as culpable the abstraction 
cf the property of others. 
5. Or Human Laws.—Ovast. 95-97. 

We shall discuss successively: Ist. Their Utility ;—2d. Their 
Authority ;—3d. Their Mutability. 

1. Man has received from nature a happy aptitude for virtue; 


but he is not able to attain to the perfection of virtue otherwise 


In the Thirteenth Century. 481 


than by subjecting himself to a discipline. It is with moral 
needs as it is with physical necessities ; he can satisfy these only 
by oblizing himself to regular labor, of which he possesses the 
instruments, to wit, intelligence and hands; whereas the animals 
find without calenlation and without trouble, food around them 
and clothing upon them. Now, we could scarcely expect man to 
be sufficient to himself in the exercise of this beneficent disci- 
pline; for its chief object is to withdraw him from the illicit en- 
joyments toward which he feels himself attracted, especially 
during youth, that is, at the age when correction is the most ef- 
ficacious and direction the most lasting. He must then receive 
from others that discipline which alone leads to virtue. For 
those whom a suitable disposition, a wise habit, or better still, 
divine grace, readily inclines to good, the paternal discipline, pro- 
ceeding by way of advice, is sufficient; but for vicious characters, 
who are not to be persuaded by words, the menaces of force must 
be opposed to the seductions of evil. Broken against this salu- 
tary obstacle, evil wills will cease to disturb the common tran- 
quillity ; they will adopt a better course, they will retain through 
habit the mode of conduct prescribed by fear, they will return to 
the ways of wisdom. Now, the only discipline which has the 
power to constrain, because it is accompanied by the fear of pun- 
ishment, is the discipline of the laws; whence we must conclude 


that human laws are required for the maintenance of peace and 


482 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


¢ 


the propagation of virtue among men. In support of this propo- 
sition, we may invoke the testimony of Aristotle, Book First: On 
Politics. ... 

2. Laws of human institution may be just or unjust. Just 
laws oblige in the interior court of conscience; they obtain this 
binding power from the eternal law, whence thev are derived. ... 
Now, laws deserve to be called just when they fulfil the condi- 
tions of justice, by the end to which they are directed, by the au- 
thor from whom they emanate, by the form which they observe ; 
that is to say, when they tend to the general good, when they do 
not exceed the power of the law-giver, when they distribute 
among all the members, with proportioned equalness, the bur- 
dens which, in the interest of all, each one must bear, 

Man, in fact, being a member of society, belongs to it as a part 
to the whole; and nature sometimes requires that a part suffer 
that the whole may be saved. In the same way, the laws distrib- 
ute to each member of society the burdens necessary for the 
preservation of social order; and, if they do this inequitable pro- 
portions, they are just, obligatory for the conscience; we may 
call them legitimate laws. The laws may be unjust in two ways: 
by opposing the relative good of man, or by opposition to the ab- 
solute good, which is God. In the first case they may trespass 
by their end, by their author, or by their form: by their end, 


when the prince has reckoned them in the interest of his pride or 


In the Thirteenth Century. 483 


of his eupidity, without regard to the public good; by their au- 
thor, when he who dictated them has overstepped the limits of 
the power of which he is the depositary; by their form, if the 
burdens imposed, even for the common utility, are not equally 
distributed. Laws thus made are no more than acts of violence ; 
for, according to St. Augustine, we may not honor with the name 
of laws those which are unjust. Consequently, they do not bind 
before the interior tribunal, unless perhaps in consideration of the 
disturbance and scandal which transgression would bring with 
it, a sufficient motive to determine a man to abandon his right; 
this is the counsel of the Gospel: ‘‘ To him that will take away 
thy coat, let go thy cloak also to him.” In the second case, 
when laws are in opposition to the absolute good, that is, to God, 
as were those of the tyrants, when idolatry was erected into a 
mandate, it is by no means permitted to obey them. ... “ We 
must obey God rather than men.” 

3. Human laws are so many ordinances by which reason en- 
deavors to direct the actions of men; and hence there are two 
causes which justify change in the legislations of this nether 
world. The first of these causes is found in the mobility of rea- 
son itself; the second, in the mutability of the circumstances amid 
which live the men whose Retons are to be directed. And first, 
it is in the nature of reason to go by degrees from the imperfect 


to the perfect: thus, in the speculative sciences, we see that the 


484 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


early philosophers left defective doctrines, which were amended 
and completed in schools formed subsequeutly. The same has 
been the course of practical knowledge : the first persons who 
employed their talents in the service of society, not being capable 
of embracing at a single glance all the interests to be contented, 
necessarily left behind them inadequate institutions. There was 
then need to modify these afterwards, and to replace them by 
others, which would have fewer omissions, but which yet would 
not be secure from subsequent reforms. ... In the second place, 
just innovations may be introduced into the law at the same time 
that correlative innovations are wrought in the condition of men; 
for, the variety of institutions must correspond to the diversity of 
conditions. St. Augustine gives an excellent example of this. 

If the people for whom the laws are laid down, are quiet in their 
behavior, serious in their thoughts, and vigilant in looking after 
their true interests, they will properly be allowed the right of 
choosing the magistrates entrusted with the administration of 
public affairs. But if the same people, gradually corrupted so 
far that their suffrage becomes venal, end by confiding the cares 
of government to dishonorable men, the power of conferring offices 
will very wisely be taken away from them, that it may be placed 
in its entirety in the hands of the small number of good men still 


remaining. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 485 


Politics. St. Thomas: ‘‘ Summa,” Prima Secunda, 
q. 105; Prima Secunda, a. 42. ‘‘ De Eruditione 
Priacipum,” 1-1, 4; V1, 3. 

1. Or THE Best FoRM OF GOVERNMENT. 


Two things are necessary to found a durable order in cities and 
in nations. The first is the admission of all to a share in the 
general government, so that all may be interested in the main- 
tenance of the public peace which has become their work; the 
second is the selection of a political form in which the powers 
may be happily combined. There exists, in fact, as Aristotle 
teaches, several forms of government. However, one chiefly dis- 
tinguishes royalty, whichis the sovereignty of a single man, himself 
subject to the laws of virtue; and aristocracy, which is the au- 
thority of the best among the citizens, also exercised within the 
limits of justice. Thus, the happiest combination of powers is 
that which would place at the head of the nation a virtuous 
prince; which would array under him a certain number of nota- 
ble persons empowered to govern according to the rules of equity ; 
and which in taking these persons from all classes, and in sub- 
jecting them to the suffrages of the entire people, would thus as- 
sociate the whole of society in the cares of government. Such 
a State would combine in its beneficent organization, royalty, 


represented by a single head; aristocracy, characterized by plur- 


486 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


ality of magistrates chosen from among the best citizens; and 
democracy, or the power of the people, shown by the election of 
the aforesaid magistrates, which would be carried out within the 
ranks of the people and by their voice. Now, this order is pre- 
cisely that which the divine law established in Israel. 

2. OF SEDITION. 

The inevitable effect of sedition is to violate the unity of the 
people, of the city, or of the empire. Jf in this we follow St. 
Augustine, the people, according to the definition given by wise 
men, is by no means a fortuitous assemblage of any sort of a 
multitude; it is a society formed by the recognition of one and 
the same law and by community in the same interests. Hence 
it is the unity of laws and of interests that sedition threatens to 
dissolve. It follows that sedition, contrary to justice and to the 
common utility, must be condemned as a sin mortal in its nature, 
and so much the more grievous as the general good is to be pre- 
ferred to the good of the individual. Now, the sin of sedition 
weighs first on those who have been its instigators, then on the 
turbulent men who have been its instruments and accomplices. 
Those, on the contrary, who have offered resistance and have 
fought for the public good, ought not to be dishonored by being 
called seditious persons, any more than those should be called 
quarrelsome persons who repel the aggression of an unjust 


quarrel, 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 487 


But we must observe that a tyrannical government, that is, one 
which proposes as its end the personal gratification of the prince, 
and not the common happiness of the subjects, thereby ceases to 
be legitimate: Aristotle thus teaches, in the third book of the 
Ethics, and in the third of the Politics. Hence, the overturning 
of such a power has not the character of sedition, provided it is 
not attended with sufficient disorder to cause more evils than did 
the tyranny itself. Strictly speaking, it is the tyrant who de- 
serves the appellation of a seditious person, by encouraging dis- 
sensions among the people that he may the more easily carry on 
his despotism. For a tyrannical government is one which is cal- 
culated in the exclusive interest of power, to the general injury 
of the people. 

3. OF THE DUTIES OF THE PRINCE.! 

Society cannot attain to the supreme end assigned to it, with- 
out the concurrence of three sorts of means, namely: virtues, en- 
lightenment, and external goods. The prince ought, then, to 
waich with wise solicitude over the cultivation of letters in his 
State, that they may flourish and that the number of learned and 


capable men may be multiplied. For, where science flourishes, 





1 This fragment is not by St. Thomas of Aquin; it is extracted from 
the book de Regimine Principum (lib. III., p. 2, ¢. viii.), written by the 
B. Egidius Colonna, Cardinal-archdishop of Bourges, a disciple of the An- 


gelic Doctor. 


488 Dante, and Cathohe Philosophy 


where the fountains of learning flow freely forth, there sooner o1 
later will instruction be disseminated among the people. Hence, 
to dissipate the darkness of ignorance which would shamefully 
envelop the face of the kingdom, it is important that the king 
should encourage letters by giving them favorable attention. 
Furthermore, if he were to refuse the necessary encouragement, 
if he did not wish his subjects to be instructed, he would cease 
to be a king, he would become a tyrant. A people has also need 
of pure manners and of virtues. For it is of small avail to know 
the end of human hfe by the light of the understanding, if disor- 
derly appetites be not disciplined by the force of the will and re- 
directed toward the attainment of the said end. It is, then, the 
prince’s duty to maintain virtuous dispositions among his sub- 
jects. Finally, external goods may serve as instruments to pro- 
cure the happiness of civil life. And consequently it is proper 
that kings and princes should govern their states and their cities 
in such a way as to procure for them an abundance of that 
wealth which may contribute to the general good. 
4. Or Nosiuirty. 

Tt is a frequent error among men to think themselves noble be- 
cause they are born of a noble family. This error may be met in 
several ways. First, if we consider the creative cause whose 
works we are—God; by being Himself the author of our race, 


He dovbtless ennobled it all. . If we look at the second and 


In the Thirteenth Century. 489 


ereated course, the first parents from whom we descend, they 
are the same for us all; all have received from Adam and Eve one 
and the same nobility, one and the same nature. We do not read 
that the Lord in the beginning made two men; one of silver, to 
be the ancestor of noblemen; and the other of clay, to be the 
father of laborers. But He made a single man formed from the 
slime of the earth, and through him we are brethren. ... The 
same ear furnishes the flour and the bran. The bran is a 
wretched food thrown to swine, and from the flour is made a 
choice bread fit to be placed on the table of kings. The rose 
and the thorn grow upon the same stem. The rose is a noble 
creature, beneficent to him who approaches her, shedding her 
perfumes in sweet profusion round about her. The thorn, on the 
contrary, is a mean excrescence which tears tlic hands of those 
imprudent enough to touch it. Thus from the same stock two 
men may be born, one a villain and the other noble. One, as the 
rose, will do good to all around him, and that one will be noble; 
the other, like the thorn, will wound those who come near him, un- 
til, like it, he shall be cast into the fire, but into eternal fire; and 
the latter will be the villain. ... If all that proceeds from a 
nobleman should inherit his nobility, animals living in his hair, 
and other natural superfluities engendered in him, would be en- 
nobled in their fashion. ... The philosophers themselves have 


recognized that nobility is not acquired by descent. What is a 


490 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


chevalier, a slave, a freedman? These are, answers Seneca, so 
many titles created by pride or by injustice. Plato said: “ There 
is no king who has not had slaves among his ancestors; there is 
no slave who is not the descendant of kings.” ... It is a fine 
thing not to have fallen away from the example of noble ances- 
tors; but it is an especially fine thing to have rendered an hum- 
ble birth illustrious by great actions. ... I repeat, then, with St. 
Jerome, that nothing appears to me desirable in this presumed 
hereditary nobility, except that noblemen are constrained to vir- 
tue by the shame of derogating. True nobility is that of the 
soul, according to the words of the poet: 


“Nobilitas sola est animum que moribus ornat.” ! 





1 This chapter and the following are extracted from the treatise de Eru- 
ditione Principum. St. Thomas, who wrote the above, belonged to the 
illustrious family of the counts of Aquin, one of the foremost in the Two 
Sicilies. Space does not permit us here to insert a remarkable chapter 
from the treatise de Regimine Principum (different from the work of the 
Same name previously cited), which is generally attributed to him. In it 
he lays down the duties of the people in the presence of tyranny: ‘‘ The 
tyrant, if he abides within certain limits, ought to be borne with for fear 
of greater evils : if he exceeds all measure, he can be deposed, even con- 
demned, by a regularly constituted power ; but attempts against his per- 
son, the work either of individual fanaticism or of private vengeance, 
would remain inexcusable crimes.”’ To complete the setting forth of the 


bold opinions of the doctors of those days, we must quote in addition the 


In the Thirteenth Century. 491 


5. Or TaXEs. 

The impiety of princes and lords who lay exorbitant taxes up- 
on their subjects will easily be understood if we consider that 
they render themselves guilty at the same time of unfaithfulness 
toward men, ingratitude toward God, and contempt toward the 
angels. The lord owes to his subjects the same fidelity which 
he is allowed to exact from them: to fail in this is then felony. 

. We often hear noblemen excuse themselves, saying: “If this 
man did not belong to me, I might think I was sinning by mal- 
treating him; but to maltreat that which belongs to me, I can 
see no sin in that, at least no grievous sin.” We might tell them 
that their power thus conceived would be like that of the devil. 
For the devil is a cruel lord, who pays with afflictions the devo- 
tion of his subjects, and treats them so much the worse as he is 
the better served by them. What man in his senses would ever 
think it less criminal to make war upon his own than upon 
strangers? Who does not know that it is treason to desert the 


cause ofa friend? Now, according tothe words of the Wise Man, 





following passage from asermon of St. Bonaventura’s (Hexceemeron V.) : 
‘““ We see nowadays a great scandal in governments ; for one would not 
confide a ship to a pilot who wasa novice in the handling of the helm, 
and yet we place at the head of nations those who are ignorant of the 
art of ruling them. So, woe to empires, when the right of succession 


places children on the throne!” 


492 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


the prince ought to look upon his subjects as poor friends given 
him by heaven. Before receiving the homage of the poor man, 
he owed him good faith and devotion, as to his brother in relig- 
ion, and that same poor man, doing homage, did by no means ab- 
solve the prince from his primal obligation; rather has the new 
act intervened to draw still closer the previous bond. How, then, 
defend from the accusation of unfaithfulness him who oppresses 
his subjects? He also gives proof of ingratitude toward God. 
Yor God has honored the powerful man, by raising him above all; 
and he, on the contrary, dishonors God in the poor whom he hu- 
miliates. He imitates the soldiers charged with leading the 
Saviour to death, who took the reed from His hands that with 
it they might strike His head. The reed is the figure of the 
temporal power which the great have received from the hand of 
the Most High, and which they use to strike Him in the person 
ofthe poor. Finally, there is the contemning of the angels. In 
truth, if Providence has confided the weak and the little to the 
care of the strong in this world, it has not willed that the former 
should be at the mercy of the latter; it has given them celestial 
guardians. Every man has his angel, to whose care he is con- 
fided. Upon that angel, then, fall the wrongs heaped upon the 
wretched here below ; and from the angel they fall back upon God 


Himself, whose minister the angel is. 


In the Tharteenth Century. 493 


VI. Nature. 


The Presence of God in All the Grades of Creation.—- 
Unity and Diversity.—Universal Attraction.— Albert 
the Great, ‘‘ De Causis et Processu Universi,” lib. II., 
tr. IV., cap. i. and 1i. 

1. We shall treat of how the First Cause rules all created he- 
ings, without being confounded with them. For if some of these 
beings seem to rule others which are subordinated to them, they 
do it in virtue of a borrowed power. What is it, in fact, to rule 
beings, if not to conduct them to that plenitude of existence which 
is their end? Now, for each one of them the plenitude of exis- 
tence consists in the sum total of the conditions without which it 
could not reach its molative perfection, accomplish its destiny, ex- 
ercise the especial function proper to it. But to conduct a being 
to perfection, to make it pass from potentiality to act, is the work 
of the generating principle which is in it, and which impresses 
upon it its specific form. Thus the informing power which comes 
from the father, fashions the embryo in the womb of the mother 
so far as to give it the living form of humanity ; then it strength- 
ens and develops the body of the child, that it may be brought 
to the perfect proportions of the age of manhood, when the com- 
pletion of the organs allows of the complete action of the corres. 


vonding faculties. ... Always. in the series of things, that which 


494 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


follows is explained by that which precedes: the second is in- 
formed by the first. All are mutually bound together and neces- 
sarily remount to the Sovereign Cause, in which existence and 
essence are one, and which, ceaselessly acting around itself, 
forms, perfects, and rules all parts of the universe. ... Now, the 
First Cause acts because It és, and not in virtue of any borrowed 
force. It is not divided into two parts, one active and the other 
inert; it does not, then, lose in its action that unchangeable unity 
which is in its nature. It is not thus with the secondary agents 
composed of existence and essence, of potentiality and act, con- 
sequently, divisible. ... A composite agent cannot modify the 
objects which are subjected to it, except by giving to them its 
form, by communicating to them its existence, while retaining in 
itself its essence entire. In fact, action supposes contact, con- 
tact necessitates communication ; and there can be no other com- 
munication than that of existence, for essence is incommunicable. 
Since then the First Cause acts by its essence, we must conclude 
that it does not communicate itself, that is, that it is not con- 
founded with the things which it creates, forms, and rules. 
Hence, these things come from it, but are not it, and weare right 
in blaming those who extend to creatures divine attributes. ... 
Thus God, who is the First Cause, remains in His immutable 
unity without confounding Himself with His works. And yet Ho 


does not abandon them: He in a certain way accompanies them 


In the Thirteenth Century. 4Q5 


and encompasses them on every side by the immensity of His 
essence, by the presence of His light, by the power of His 
action. 

2. From the considerations just set forth, we must conclude 
that the First Cause exerts upon all things one and the same in- 
fluence. Since in it existence and essence are one, it is impossi- 
ble to conceive it separated from its infinite perfections. Its per- 
fections are then identical among themselves, and the effusion of 
them cannot vary. But though this effusion is unvarying as com- 
ing from on high, yet it is not received below in a likeabundance 
by the divers beings upon which it is poured out. It fills them 
according to the unequal measure of their capacity, which is pro- 

. 
portioned to the distance at which they are found ; for some revolve 
in the vicinity of the First Cause, while others move at a great 
distance. All, then, participate according to their capacity in the 
effusion of the divine goodness and light ; they are penetrated by 
the essence, by the presence, and by the power of the Creator. 
Now, these different distances, these degrees of nearness at which 
creatures are placed, constitute a hierarchic order, by means of 
which number is reduced to unity; so that we must herein rec- 
ognize the work of the Eternal Wisdom; for such is the great- 
ness of the perfections of God, that none among created objects 
could contain them entire. ... At least He has willed that they 


should descend to the very depths of creation, and that there 


496 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


should remain nothing so obscure or so low as not to enter in 
some manner into relation with the Divine Being." 

3. And if we ask whence comes the universal tendency of 
things toward the Divine Being, it is easy to answer by starting 
from the truths already demonstrated. In fact, we have amply 
proved that God penetrates all things with His light; and this 
light, in penetrating them, sketches in them an imperfect resem- 
blanee to God Himself. Now, according to the words of Boeth- 
ius, like is attracted by that which it is like; for from it does it 
receive the power to subsist, growth, and perfection. Thence 
comes it that all things tend to God as to the Sovereign Good, 
as to the supreme end toward which all actions are co-ordinated. 
And there is nothing capable of exerting any attraction around 


itself, ifit does not contain a divine property. When, then, any one 


complains that he has not met with the Sovereign Good, he errs: 





1 The same thought is developed with perhaps greater clearness in the 
fourteenth chapter of the same book. ‘* God knows Himself, and sheds 
abroad His light, which enlightens all things, and which, being reflected 
in them, leayesin them as it were an image of the Divinity. He wills 
Himself as universal prin iple, and in so doing He excites in all things a 
sort of love which inclines them toward the Divinity. He acts, and by 
His power He gives to all things the force to move toward the Divinity. 
This image, this love, this determining force, are, then, in all things, 
aithough in different conditions, according as we treat of brute matter, 


of plants, of animals, of man, or of pure intelligences.” 


In the Thirteenth Century. 497 


he errs by reason of having attached himself, by imprudent ap- 
petites, to the signs and appearances of the Sovereign Good 
Itself. And yet these appearances and these signs reflect some 
image of the supreme reality, and it is through this alone that 


they attract and captivate the affection of men.” 


II, Power of Nature; Powerlessness of Magic.—Pos- 
sible Progress of Skill ; Discoveries of Modern Times, — 
Roger Bacon, ‘“‘ de Secretis Operibus Artis et Nature et 


Nullitate Magiz,” cap. i.—vii. 


1. Although nature is admirable in its operations, art, which 
modifies it and uses it as an instrument, shows itself more pow- 
erful than nature. Outside the works of nature and of art, noth- 
ing remains except prodigies above our reach, or spells beneath 
our dignity. ... Such are jugglers who cheat our eyes by leger- 
demain, pythonesses, who, fetching their docile voices from 
stomach, throat, or palate, can at will make to be heard distant 
words, strange sounds, as though some invisible spirit were ex- 
pressing itself by the medium of their organ. But, still more 


wicked than such impostors, are they who, contemning all phil- 


2 The idea of attraction is perfectly expressed in this comparison em- 
ployed by St. Dionysius the Areopagite: ‘‘God is called Love, in so much 
as He moves beings and draws them upward, as the stationary magnet 


attracts iron.’ 


498 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy — 


osophy and in despite of reason, call upon the evil spirit in order 
to obtain the accomplishment of their impotent will, who think 
to fetch him or to send him away by natural means, who offer 
him prayers and sacrifices. It would be incomparably more easy 
and more sure to ask from God and the angels the satisfaction of 
our just desires; for, if sometimes the evil spirits show themselves 
favorable to our apparent interests, it is for the punishment of 
our sins; but this happens still by the permission of God, who 


alone and with unshared power rules over the course of human 
destinies. 


2. Tf will now recount some of the wonders contained in nature 


or produced by art, in which magic has no share, in order to prove 
how much beyond all‘ comparison, they surpass magical inven- 
tions. For use in navigation, machines may be constructed such 
that the largest vessels, directed by a single man, shall traverse 
rivers and séas more rapidly than if they were filled with oars- 
men; also, carriages may be made, which without horses, shall 
move with inconceivable swiftness. 

It is possible to make an apparatus such that a man seated 
within it and moving artificial wings by means of a lever, may 
travel like a bird through the air. An instrument, three fingers 
long and as much in width, would be capable of lifting enormous 
weights; it might even serve to release captives from their pris- 


ons by enabling them to surmount at will the greatest heights. 


Ln the Thirteenth Century. 499 


There is another instrument by means of which a single hand 
can draw to itself bodies of considerable mass, in spite of the re- 
sistance of a thousand arms. Further, machines can be con- 
ceived by which a diver could without peril be taken down to 
the bottom of the waters.... These things have been seen, 
either among the ancients, or in our own day, with the exception 
of the flying machine, the design of which has been thought out 
by a learned man well known tome. A multitude of other en- 
gines and useful appliances could be invented :—such as bridges 
which would span the broadest rivers without piers or any in- 
termediate support. 

3. But, among all the objects which claim our admiration, we 
ought especially to remark the play of light. We can combine 
transparent glasses and mirrors in such a way that unity seems 
to be multiplied, that a single man appears to be an army, and 
that we may make as many suns and moons to be seen as we de- 
sire. For the vapors diffused through the air are sometimes dis- 
posed in such a way that, by a curious reflection, they duplicate 
and even triplicate the disc of the moon or the sun. ... And it 
would be easy thus by sudden apparitions, to spread dismay in a 
city or in the army of an enemy. This contrivance will appear 
still easier if one considers that a system of transparent glasses 
may be constructed which can carry the eye near to distant ob- 


jects, or make near ones seem to be far away; or which, indeed, 


500 Dante, and Catholic Philosophy 


by displacing their images, can present them on any side that one 
desires. Thus from an incredible distance we may read the fin- 
est characters, or count the most indistinguishable objects. It is 
said that Ceesar by the aid of immense mirrors, saw from the 
height of the coasts of Gaul, several cities in Great Britain. By 
analogous processes, we might enlarge, lessen, or reverse the 
forms of bodies; we might deceive the sight by endless illu- 
sions. ... The solarrays, skilfully conducted and gathered togeth- 
er in bundles by the power of refraction, are capable of kindling 
at the desired distance, objects exposed to their activity. 

4. Other results, not less curious, may be obtained at less ex- 
pense. Such are artificial fires for casting to a distance; these 
are composed of naphtha, rock-salt, and petroleum. ... Such is 
also the Greek fire, in imitation of which a large number of com- 
bustibles are fabricated. ... Means are not wanting to make lamps 
of which the wicks shall not consume away: for we know of 
bodies which burn without being consumed: tale, for instance, 
and the skin of the salamander. Art has its thunders, more for- 
midable than thunder from the skies. A small quantity of 
matter, as big as one’s thumb, occasions a terrible explosion ac- 
companied by a vivid light, and this fact can be so repeated as to de- 
stroy a city or entire battalions. ... The attraction which the mag- 
net exerts upon iron, is in itself fertile in marvels unknown to the 


commonalty, known only to those whom science has initiated into 


In the Thirteenth Century. 501 


its ineffable shows. Now the property of the magnet is found 
elsewhere; it takes on an ever-increasing importance: gold, sil- 
ver, and the other metals allow of being attracted by the stone 
which tests them. There is a spontaneous drawing together 
among mineral masses, among plants, among the dissected organs 
of animals. Having witnessed these wonders of nature, nothing 
henceforth astounds my faith either in the works of man or in 
the miracles of God. 

5. The final degree of perfection to which human skill, aided 
by all the forces of creation, may attain, is the faculty of prolong- 
ing life. The possibility of a considerable prolongation is estab- 
lished by experience. An infallible means would consist in the 
continued and scrupulous observance of a regimen regulating 
food and drink, sleeping and waking, activity and rest, all the 
functions of the body, even the passions of the soul, down to the 
conditions of the surrounding atmosphere. This regimen is strict- 
ly determined by the precepts of medicine; ... for the learned 
have ardently endeavored to extend by a hundred years or more 
the ordinary limits of human life, by delaying, or at least by di- 
minishing, the ills of oldage. However, they by no means ignore 
the existence of a set term, irrevocably fixed since the day of the 
first Fall: they simply seek to regain that term, by removing 
the accidental obstacles which stop the course of life. ... If some 


one should object that neither Plato nor Aristotle, nor the great 


502 Dante, amd Catholic Philosophy. 


Hippocrates nor Galen, was able to attain to this wonderful pro- 
longation of life, I would answer, that those great men failed to 
attain several pieces of knowledge of a secondary interest, which 
have been found out by other thinkers coming after them. Aris- 
totle may not have penetrated into the innermost secrets of na- 
ture; even as the learned men of the present day are themselves 
ignorant of many truths which will be familiar to the veriest 


novices among the scholars of future times, 


APPENDIX No. ft. 


Extract from St. Thomas: ‘‘Opuscul. de Sensu Re- 
spectu Particularium et Intellectu Respectu 


Universalium.” 


oe ig Aer ate are 

NDIVIDUATIO naturee communis in rebus materialibus et 

tT corporalibus est ex materia corporali sub determinatis dim- 
ensionibus contenta. Universale autem est per abstractionem ab 
ejus modi materia, et materialibus conditionibus individuantibas, 
Patet ergo quod similitudo rei que recipitur in sensu repreesentat 
rem secundum quod est singularis, sed recepta in intellectu re- 
priesentat rem secundum rationem nature universalis. ... Ipsa 
autem natura cui accidit intentio universitatis habet duplex esse : 
unum quidem materiale, secundum quod est in natura materiali, 
aliud autem immateriale, secundum quod est in intellectu.  Pri- 
mo quidem modo non potest advenire intentio universitatis, quia 
per materiam individuatur. Advenit ergo universalis intentio 
secundum quod abstrahitur a materia individuali: non potest au- 
tem abstrahi a materia individuali realiter sicut platonici posu- 


erunt.” 
508 


APPENDIX No. 2. 


Second Sentence of Exile Issued Against Dante. 


os Cante de Cabriellibus de Eugubio, Potestas civitatis 


Florentie, infra scriptam condemnationis summam dam- 





us ac proferimus in hune modum. D. Andream de Gherardinis, 
D. Lapum Saltarelli Judicem, D. Palmerium de Altovitis, D. Dona- 
tum Albertum de sextu Portee Domus, Lapum Dominici de sextu 
Ultrarui, Lapum Blondum de sextu Sancti Petri Majoris; Gherardi- 
num Deodati populi Sancti Martini Episcopi, Cursum Domini A1- 
berti Ristori, Junctum de Biffolis, Lippum Beechi, DanreM ALLI- 
GHERU, Orlanduccium Orlandi, Ser Simonem Guidalotti de sextu 
Ultrarui, Ser Ghuecium Medicum de sextu Portee Domus, Guido- 
men Brunum de Falconierii, de sextu Sancti Petri. Contra quos 
processimus et per inquisitionem ex nostro officio et curie nostre 
factum super eo et ex eo quod ad aures nostras et ipsius curie 
nostre pervenerit, fama publica precedente, quod cum ipsi vel 


corum quilibet nomine et occasione Baracteriarum, iniquarum ex- 


Appendix No 2. 505 


torsionum et illicitorum Inerorum fuerint condemnati, quod in ip- 
sis condemnationibus docetur apertius, condemnationes easdem 
ipsi vel eorum aliquis termino assignato non solverint. Qui om- 
nes et singuli per nuntium communis Florentie citati et requisiti 
fuerunt legitime, ut certo termino jam elapso, mandatis nostris 
parituri venire deberent et se 4 premissa inquisitione protinus ex- 
cusarent. Qui non venientes per clarum clarissimi publicum 
bapnitorem posuisse in bapnum communis Florentie subscripser- 
unt (sic), in quod incurrentes eosdem absentis contumacia inno- 
davit; ut hzee omnia nostre curie latius acta tenent. Ipsos et 
ipsorum quemlibet ideo habitos ex ipsorum contumacia pro con- 
fessis, secundum jura statutorum et ordinamentorum communis 
et populi civitatis Florentie, et ex vigore nostri arbitrii, et omni 
modo et jure quibus melius possumus, ut si quis predictorum ullo 
tempore in fortiam dicti communis pervenerit, talis peryeniens 
igne COMBURATUR sic quod moriatur, in his seriptis sententialiter 
condemnamus. Lata, pronuntiata et promulzata fuit dicta con- 
demnationis summa per dictum Cantem potestatem predictum pro 
tribunali sedentem in consilio generali civitatis Florentie, et lecta 
per me Bonorum notarium supra dictum, sub anno Domini, 
MCCCII., Indictione XV., tempore Domini Bonifacii Papze VIIL., 
die X. mensis Martii, presentibus testibus Ser Masio de Eugubio 
Ser Bernardo de Camerino, Notariis dicti domini potestatis, et 


pluribus aliis in eodem consilio existentibus. 


APPENDIX No. 3. 


Extract fromthe ‘‘ Premio di Marsilio Ficino Fiorentino 
Sopra la Monarchia di Dante, Fradotta da lui di 


Latino in Lingua Toscana.” 


A Bernardo del Nero ed Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, 


Cittadini Fiorentini. 


s ANTE Alighieri per patria celeste, per abitazione fiorentino, 
di stirpe angelico, in professione filosofo-poetico, benché 
non parlasse in lingua greca con quello sacro padre de’ filosofi, in- 
terprete della verita, Platone, nientedimeno in spirito parlo in modo 
con lui, che di molte sentenzie platoniche adorno i libri suoi; e per 
tale ornamento massime illustro tanto la citta fiorentina, che cosi 
bene Firenze di Dante, come Dante di Firenze si puo dire. Tre 
regni troviamo scritti nel nostro rettissimo duce Platone: uno de’- 
beati, altro de’ miseri, e il terzo de’ peregrini. Beati chiama 
quelli, che sono nella citta di vita restituti; miseri, quelli che 


per sempre ne sono privati; peregrini, quelli che fuori di detta 


505 


Appendix No. 3. 507 


citta sono, ma non giudicati in sempiterno esilio. In questo ter- 
zO ordine pone tutti i viventi, e de’ morti quella parte, che a tem- 
porale purgazione e€ deputata. Questo ordine platonico prima 
segui Virgilio; questo segui Dante dipoi, col vaso di Virgilio 
beendo alle platoniche fonti. KE perd del regno dei beati, de’ 
miseri, e de’ peregrini, di questa vita passati, nella sua Commedia 


2legantemente trattd....” 


THE END. 


















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